The Race for Paris (15 page)

Fletcher apologized for the lack of wine as he poured us glasses of eau-de-vie.

“To Paris,” he said, and we lifted our glasses.

“To Paris,” I said, and I took a careful sip, the brandy taste sharp and warm on my tongue.
To Paris
, I thought, not quite believing still that we hadn’t been taken into custody and returned home already, or chosen to turn back ourselves.

Liv asked Fletcher to translate the menu: “beef,” “chicken,” “duck.” Watching him flush with the odd pleasure of her needing him even for this small thing, I wondered at my own proud French.

“. . . head shaving. God, who knew a dame would look so ugly?” said an American, a Midwesterner joining the table behind Fletcher. I studied my menu, wondering why American men were so often too loud, why they couldn’t have the charming manners of British men.

Fletcher said, “I thought we might never have a decent meal again.”

Liv smiled. “We might not after this. Let’s order everything.”

There was agreement around our table that we should order absolutely everything, but no one ordered the beef. We had too often seen local townspeople coming through fields just after battles, bringing knives with which they carved dead horses into butcher-cut slabs. Fletcher opted for the chicken, as did I. Liv chose the duck.

From the table behind Fletcher, I heard the American again: “. . . crushed to death by one of our own tanks.” Fletcher and Liv, too, heard him. I leaned forward and they leaned back to better hear, all of us wanting to know and not wanting to at the same time.

“Tom Treanor, that’s who it was,” the American said.

Tom Treanor, an
LA Times
journalist Fletcher knew. An
LA Times
journalist Fletcher had known.

I stared at the flame on the little votive burning in the center of the table, knowing I ought to be making conversation but unable to do much more than choke down a bite of chicken.

“. . . Grant and Hemingway swinging at each other,” we heard from the next table. Bruce Grant of the
Chicago Times
and Ernest Hemingway, who was reporting for
Collier’s
. Hemingway and his friends were tying up ten rooms at the Grand Veneur, stacking them high with ammunition while other
correspondents were sleeping on straw in the dining room or searching the countryside for beds. “The man says the hotel is his general headquarters,” the American said. “Says he’s been holding off the Germans for days and it’s time he had some help.”

I took another sip of the eau-de-vie, trying to think of something to say but unable to shake the idea of any journalist crushed to death like those soldiers in the mud at Falaise.

The conversation at our table tentatively resumed, no one saying a word about Tom Treanor. The others speculated about which troops would go which way into Paris, and who would be first. We all wanted to be with whichever troop would be first, or claimed we did, although the news of Tom Treanor’s death certainly gave me pause.

Liv said little; she was still listening to the conversation at the table behind her: “. . . not over a dame, no. Grant suggested Hemingway stop playing ‘chickenshit general’ with his ‘chickenshit little army,’ and MacVane had to step between them to break it up.” Hemingway was pissing off Patton and Leclerc both with his ever-present bottle of brandy and his rooms full of weapons and his ruffian companions he wanted to pass off for a private army.

Fletcher raised one eyebrow, and Liv smiled guiltily—over the eavesdropping? Or over letting her duck go to waste when she’d had nothing but tinned food since those garden vegetables at the Saint-Lô–Périers road? She stabbed at a tiny carrot and took a dry bite of crusty bread. She asked Fletcher for a cigarette. He gave her the rest of the pack and a Zippo lighter, and told her to keep them in case we wanted to smoke back in our room.

“At least Hemingway is in the war,” the American said. “Better than that coward Charles Harper. He sends his wife over here while he’s shacked up with the rich little daughter of—”

Fletcher scooted his chair back sharply as he stood, the screech of the chair legs on the floor cutting off the man’s words. Everyone at the table was looking at them now, at Fletcher standing there like an idiot and Liv looking up at him, startled, her cigarette not yet lit. Had Liv even heard the damned American? Although that was just wishful thinking. The flat look in her eyes and her utter upright stillness—yes, she’d heard.

A murmur around the table, stifled amusement. They thought this a lovers’ spat of some sort. They hadn’t heard the American, then.

Fletcher was standing over Liv, who sat looking from him to the bronze woman and her bronze jug, the old stone man, the cherubs. They were all part of a fountain, I realized, although no water ran.

Fletcher sank back into his chair and unconsciously tugged at his ear. “It’s merely—”

A rumor. A dreadful thing.

He wrapped his fingers around his glass of eau-de-vie, and I did the same, feeling the crystal cool in my fingers. Liv met Fletcher’s gaze directly, and those of the others around the table. For a moment, I thought maybe she hadn’t heard after all.

She leaned into the table and said to Fletcher and me in a low, conspiratorial voice, “They probably believe the rumor that I’m ‘expecting,’ too.”

She tucked her unlit cigarette back into the pack, the pack and lighter into the pocket of her blouse, and lifted her glass of eau-de-vie. “To Paris,” she said.

I echoed her words, “To Paris,” listening to the tink of glass on glass.

Not much later, Liv excused herself, leaving her dinner largely untouched, saying it was too hot to eat anything and
she just wanted to climb into that feather bed upstairs. When I moved to join her, she told me to keep Fletcher company. And even before she disappeared through the doorway, Fletcher leaned across the table, closer to me.

We were with a roomful of journalists in the middle of a war, but there was candlelight and good food and eau-de-vie and the anticipation of Paris, the hope.

“Jane,” he said softly, his lips moist, his hair that I’d once cut now combed neatly back. He leaned even closer, the eau-de-vie sweet on his breath.

He said, “Charles Harper is the one who sent the MPs after you.”

“Charles?” I repeated, confused.

“Charles arranged for them to track down Liv,” he insisted. “He wants her home and he doesn’t give a toss what Liv wants.”

Fletcher leaned back in his chair and took a healthy sip of eau-de-vie. I thought to protest, to ask why Charles would be having an affair and wanting Liv home at the same time. But I thought of Tommy kissing me at the Harpeth River the very night he’d proposed to Miss Ingram, and I raised my own glass to my lips and threw the liquid back. The alcohol was rusty and bitter on my tongue.

L
iv was in bed when I returned to the room. I turned off the light she’d left on for me and let up the blackout shade she’d pulled down, and I gathered in the clothes—damp, but no longer dripping. I hung them inside the room’s armoire, then sat at the end of the bed and unbuckled my boots in the moonlight, and stripped off my fatigues. My head was thick from too much of the eau-de-vie, from too many cigarettes lit only to be smashed out moments later over too many days and nights of war.

Liv said, “I wanted to strangle that nasal Chicagoan,” her voice startling me.

She lay under the covers despite the heat.

“I know,” I said.

“I wanted to stuff Fletcher’s pity down his damned throat,” she said.

I tossed my slacks aside, stood in my blouse and panties in the dimly moonlit room. “Down Fletcher’s throat, or the Chicagoan’s?”

She laughed. I was relieved. She might have wanted to stuff my words down my throat, too.

I swatted a mosquito on my bare neck, sweaty again in the hot room. I closed the window. There was no breeze anyway.

Liv said, “I’m being exactly who Charles fell in love with, Jane: a photographer who sleeps in damp clothes in muddy trenches and eats meat from tins.”

“I know,” I said again.

She pulled the goose-feather coverlet up to her chin. I pushed back the coverlet on my side and climbed in beside her. A real bed with clean sheets.

“It’s just a rumor,” I said, remembering my mother’s words the night of Tommy’s engagement party, about emotions that were public and those that were private, about rumors and reputations and ruined lives.

I said, “As early as tomorrow you’ll be in Paris, Liv, photographing the freed city.”

“It will make our reputations.”

“Our reputations,” I repeated, looking through the closed window to the trees laced with moonlight, wondering if Mama would be proud of what I was doing or if she would worry whether any man would want a newspaper girl like me after the war.

Liv said, “I try to imagine cheering Parisians celebrating in front of the Arc de Triomphe, with me capturing them on film, but I keep seeing New York. The apartment. Anthony in his white gloves, and his deep ‘Mrs. Harper.’ The view from our living room over the hushed white of Central Park after a new snow. The sharp line of Charles’s chin and his long, slender fingers as he edits. The slightly lost look in his eyes in bed at night, without his glasses.”

She climbed from the bed, touching the graceful curve of the bedpost in the muted moonlight and groping for the outline of the armoire beyond it, the cigarette package. She lit a cigarette and stood looking through the window glass despite the blackout. “Charles always sleeps on his back,” she said. “Isn’t that strange?”

I lit a cigarette, too, and joined her at the window. “It’s just a rumor, Liv,” I repeated.

Beyond the trees, the moon was slipping into mounting clouds, leaving me peering through the screen of branches just as I forever peered through the confessional screen, trying to see what I wasn’t meant to see.

Liv said, “This is what Charles does when he wants something so much he can’t bear the thought of not having it. It was the way he dealt with that first, brief attempt to have a child, his disappointment when I didn’t become pregnant right away.”

She coughed against the smoke in her throat, then, against that truth.

“Charles saw my failure to become pregnant as some fault of his virility,” she said. “He would never admit that, though. Not even to himself.”

She cranked open the window just as a last bit of moon disappeared. “He wants a Renny and a Charles Jr., too, but
he won’t allow himself to want anything he isn’t sure he can have.”

Charles was the one who’d sent the MPs after us. Had Fletcher meant for me to tell Liv he thought that, or to keep it to myself? I wasn’t sure I believed it, but I wasn’t sure I didn’t.

She said, “We’ll be in Paris tomorrow or the next day or the next. I’ll take my pictures, and I’ll go home.”

That had been our plan all along, even if neither of us had ever thought of it with such a sharp edge.

“I suppose you should, Liv,” I said, not sure what I’d do without her, but sure there was nothing for me back home.

“‘You’ll get yourself killed, for God’s sake.’ That’s what Charles is afraid of. That’s what he can’t bear.” She leaned out the window. “Of course he can’t bear it,” she said. “If he were here and I were at home I wouldn’t be able to bear it either. And this is what he does. He decides he doesn’t want me because he’s not sure I’ll come back alive.”

I took another drag on the cigarette and held my breath for a long moment, the tobacco burning deep in my chest. The gray of the smoke hung before us in the humid air, and it was dark out, not even a hint of moonlight reflecting off the wavy window glass now. It was impossible to see what lay beyond the skeleton branches, even just outside the window.

THURSDAY, AUGUST 24, 1944

[T]hese Frenchmen were just going out of their minds wanting to get to Paris, as we all did . . . Finally the order came.

                    
—Journalist Helen Kirkpatrick

A
thunderstorm pelted the windows of the inn’s dining room the next morning. The dull dawn light showed the curled corners of peeling wallpaper, a crack across the marble fireplace hearth, a thin layer of dust on the bronze woman and the stone man and the cherubs in the dry fountain. No tables pushed together to accommodate big groups. No one to tease us. No loud Chicagoan. Only two other diners across the room, and a limited menu: bread and apples and pears. Even the yeasty smell wafting from the kitchen didn’t leave me hungry, but the food came served on real china, and our hands were soap-scrubbed clean.

“Jane,” Liv started. “Fletcher.” She fingered a slice of crusty bread and tore it in two. “I was thinking that—”

I watched the rain streaming down the windows. I’d never
imagined Allied troops marching into Paris in a downpour. A real frog wash, Mama would say.

“I’ll go first,” Fletcher said. “I’m thinking it’s about to happen. As soon as tomorrow you two will be sending your photographs and stories off from Paris and the whole world will know your names.” He raised his cup.

I took a sip of my coffee, an unfortunate barley-based drink. “
I’m
thinking this stuff they call coffee here is
nasty
,” I said. “I’m thinking perhaps I’d do better with tea?”

Fletcher said, “The tea, I’m afraid, is no less beastly.”

With lemon. That was how he took it back home, but there were no real lemons in France any more than there were real coffee beans.

Liv said, “I was thinking that if we left for Paris now, we’d be the first correspondents there.”

Fletcher sat back, a mix of amusement and concern on his neatly shaved face.

She said, “We could photograph the troops coming into the city.”

A gust of wind pushed the rain more violently against the windows, rattling the panes.

“Head-on,” Liv said.

Fletcher cleared his throat. “You forget, I’m not a correspondent.”

“The first
photographers
there.”

Someone laughed at the table across the room.

Fletcher said, “Jane isn’t a photographer.”

“You’re a military photographer, Fletcher,” Liv insisted. “You
need
to get there now. You don’t want to cover the liberation. You want to photograph the Germans defending a major city.”

“I’ll go alone then, shall I?” Fletcher responded. “I expect you two can find another lift.”

“It was
your
idea. ‘I imagine she intends to march in before the troops will have done!’—that’s what you told the little girls at Trefoil.”

He pushed back his plate, ran a hand over the back of his neck. “It’s pouring out, Liv.”

“We’d get the front page, the first pictures from Paris.” To me, “You’d get the first story, Jane.”

I glanced at the fountain, the bronze woman with the empty water jug. Again, laughter from the other table. Low, polite laughter.

Fletcher said, “It won’t be the first photographs taken that will run in your newspapers, Livvie. It will be the first photographs to make it past the censors’ shears and to the States.”

“But we’d—”

“
We’d get killed
,” he said softly but insistently, leaning forward as he spoke. “We would be politely introduced to the first German soldier we came across, and before we knew it, we would be begging to spill our guts about precisely how many forces would be attacking the city, and precisely when.”

Liv lowered her gaze, fixing on Fletcher’s smooth chin, the skin there pale and vulnerable. “Full page,” she said. “Full bleed.”

And there was a part of me, too, that wanted to go, a part of me that minded the feather bed and the china teacup, the fresh bread and the porcelain tub, and my clean hands.

L
iv and I emerged from our top-floor room not much later that morning, rucksacks and musette bags on our backs and our rain ponchos on over it all. We would
not
go into Paris ahead of the troops but there was no reason we had to wait in Rambouillet for a briefing to tell us where we were going.
We knew where we were going. General Leclerc’s men—the French Second Armored Division—were already on the road, waiting for the order to advance, as was Barton’s US Fourth Infantry. There was no reason we ought not to be out there, as close to Paris as possible. That was where the stories would be. Where the photos would be.

Fletcher was waiting at the landing to the floor below ours, in his rain gear, too. Together, we headed down the main stairs for the lobby. We’d turned the corner for the final half flight of stairs when Fletcher stopped suddenly, muttering, “Hell.”

A man at the reception desk spoke intently to the clerk. He wore a snowdrop helmet, gloves, and belt—unfathomably dry—and a thin mustache.

Fletcher silently urged Liv and me both backward up the stairs. “Your guardian angel, I’m afraid,” he whispered as we hurried off toward the servants’ stairs and the back door.

The damned jeep had no top to protect us from the downpour, or from the view of the MP who might emerge at any moment. Pale eyes, I thought, although we hadn’t paused long enough to see, really. It wouldn’t take him more than the moment of opening our rooms to realize we’d left, and he wouldn’t have much doubt which direction we were headed. It was only a question of which road toward Paris we took.

We climbed into the jeep with our packs still on under our ponchos, Fletcher letting his seat all the way back with a single movement and still with almost no room between his body and the steering wheel. He threw the jeep into reverse. Backed out.

“Don’t look now,” he said.

Liv, in the backseat, turned and looked over her shoulder, and I did, too. The inn’s door swung open.

The front tire was losing air again. The cracked windshield was a confusion of streaming raindrops as we sped off.

“The French will be the first into the city,” Liv said. If she was afraid the major would catch up with us, it didn’t show in her rain-drenched face, and there was nothing of the excitement that ought to have been in her voice at the prospect of being caught. The liberation of Paris might have been only an obstacle to her getting home to Charles.

“Right, we go in with the French,” Fletcher agreed. The French forces would be too wrapped up in the liberation of Paris to mind two AWOL American journalists in their ranks.

Liv removed her pack from underneath her poncho and tucked it beneath the supply tarp. I helped Fletcher remove his while he drove, and heaved it beside Liv’s, then took off my own.