The Race for Paris

by Meg Waite Clayton

  Her brother had enlisted by then, and she’d been living alone in the home they’d grown up in. Charles had seen a photograph she’d taken of a friend of her father’s, and he’d arranged a train ticket to New York for an interview. When she’d presented her photos, Charles had studied the top one for a long moment before removing his glasses and cleaning them, replacing them for a second, closer look. She hadn’t known at the time what the gesture meant, but she’d learned soon enough that if she found some excuse to stop by his office with her shots, she could sink into the succor of Charles, in that small gesture of cleaning his glasses, delivering praise no words could replace.

  We peered over the edge to our dangling feet and the rough wood of the barn, the dark ground below, and we wondered together where, exactly, Fletcher was. I wondered to myself if he would come back alive—a fear I wouldn’t vocalize lest the speaking of it could somehow bring it to be.

  “I was terrified the morning I shipped out. Were you, Jane?” Liv said as if she could hear the fear in my silence. “Looking through the barbed wired fence to soldiers picking wildflowers from a scrappy field and presenting them to girls in WAC uniforms.”

  Smelling the brine and rotting fish guts and diesel exhaust, I remembered. Listening to the nervous laughter and too-loud voices, the clanging of the shipyard, the lap of the sea.

  “The ship nearest me was boarding when I arrived,” she continued. “Women’s Army Corps nurses climbing the long, narrow wooden planks, or already on the deck, leaning on the ship’s railing, looking down at the safe, dry land. At the end of the line, a young American soldier handed a motley collection of wildflowers to one of the nurses, who filled her seasickness bag with water and put the daisies into it, to keep them fresh. He had a long, narrow face and a white smile, that soldier did, and he was tall, too, like Charles is, except that where Charles moves with an easy grace, this boy was all skinny arms and legs, all oversized hands and feet.”

  She dropped the piece of hay from my hair over the edge, and it fluttered away into darkness.

  “Perhaps Charles was like that as well, though,” she said, “before he grew into himself.”

  We both listened for a moment to a sound that might have been Fletcher returning, but was only the breeze rattling the barn door.

  “‘Talk American to me’—that’s what that boy was saying to that nurse,” Liv said. “It’s not something a camera can capture, though, the ache of a voice.”

  She started talking about a photo she’d taken at the troop marshaling area then, raising it the way she raised her camera, to ward off emotion. A hundred women crowding the railing in one neat horizontal line of skirt hems, military “pink”—a warm gray, actually—a regulation sixteen inches from the deck. “All those baggy-stockinged legs upside down on the ground glass,” she said. “Women no different than the women I’d spent the whole war photographing—women supporting the war effort when what I want is to photograph the war itself. Like those women I shot for ‘The Homefront.’” A dozen Long Island grandmothers who’d met daily for bridge before the war now sitting in the same parlors knitting for the troops. Women working the swing shift in a munitions plant outside Newark. A typists’ pool at the Pentagon.

  “That was some of my best work, that spread,” she said, “although it could have used a better title. Not my department, though, titles. Charles is forever reminding me of that.”

  I listened to her untempered pride—that, too, a shield. I supposed it was why she hadn’t been popular as a child, because insecurity masked as arrogance rarely played well in a girl. Bragging on herself, people back home would have said. A bossy girl who bragged on herself. But maybe not. Liv was a rich girl, and rich girls were held to a different standard.

  “I turned back to the gate after I boarded the Channel-crossing ship,” Liv said, “so sure that Charles would have changed his mind and come to see me off. But the eyes I met were those of the boy who wanted to talk American with that sweet young WAC, who was no longer anywhere in sight.”

  I took Liv’s hand in mine, the distant cow the lone sound as I tried to make sense of her words. Her husband had come all the way from New York to England to see her off to this war, but then hadn’t? I remembered boarding the Channel crossing ship myself, swallowing against the dryness in my throat, the breakfast toast dry in my stomach, too, as I’d climbed the ramp to a ship that was more cruise ship than military craft, where I had a private cabin complete with a waiter bringing lemon squash to the door, where dinner was served on china and I ate guiltily, aware that the extravagant routine was meant for the boys the ship usually took across the Channel, who might end up with dog tags nailed to wooden crosses here in France.

  “When I wrote Charles about the crossing,” Liv said, “I told him there was a Renny on the boat.”

  A Renny and a Charles Jr. Marie and I wanted children, too, but Liv alone had imagined names.

  “Charles was the one who first told me I had to get to Paris,” she said. “Charles said the war would be won with the liberation of Paris and having the first photos out would make my career.”

  I said, “Maybe when it came right down to you actually coming here, your husband was afraid for you, Liv.”

  “He wrote me later that he wished he’d come to see me off,” she said. “I ought to have written him back that there was no Renny on the boat, no Renny anywhere.”

  In the distance, the cloudy darkness lightened, a suggestion of moon that darkened again, that might have been an illusion all along.

  “The girls before me, they were beautiful and charming—rich New York girls Charles grew up with, mostly,” Liv said. “Girls who couldn’t imagine Charles’s newspaper would mean more to him than they would. Or not exactly more, but . . . Do you suppose all men are like that, Jane?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Charles thinks he wants me to come home, but he wouldn’t love me if I were the type of girl who would come home after she’d gotten to the war, or even the type of photographer who sent back photos that weren’t the best. He can’t see how plain I’d be to him without my camera.”

  SAINT-LÔ-PÉRIERS ROAD

  MONDAY, JULY 24, 1944

  At last I’ve seen with my own eyes the front I’ve been writing about.

  —Journalist Sonia Tomara from “Italian Front at a Standstill” in the April 13, 1944, New York Herald Tribune

  The morning of the twenty-fourth of July dawned, if not clear, then at least not as thickly overcast as the days before. The word went out that the planes were taking off through the cloud cover, and everyone gathered again in the farmyard. Ernie Pyle, who’d slept in a bombed-out farmhouse the night before, looked so weary that I wondered if what people were saying was true: that he was considering going home, that he lay awake nights for fear of dying, that he’d written his editor that he didn’t know how he could keep covering the war, nor how he could abandon the troops.

  Pyle said to Liv that morning, “I hate to think the gal who shot ‘Operating Room by Flashlight’ might be prevented from doing more work like that. ‘Operating Room by Electric Torchlight,’ it was captioned in the London papers. No credit line, but people know.”

  Pyle paused, considering, as I registered his words: Liv’s photos had run without attribution, as AP photos often did. Mrs. Roosevelt would have had to go to some trouble to find out who’d taken the shots; she wouldn’t have known from the photographs themselves to write to Liv any more than she would have known that the piece of mine she read was a different thing altogether from the one I wrote, that Joey hadn’t lived. She might have come across my piece only in searching for Liv, through my byline that ran in the Banner with Liv’s photographs.

  Pyle said, “You’re a smart girl, Liv, not to file your photos. The minute you do, this Major Adam Jones fellow knows exactly where you are.”

  Liv and Pyle talked and talked then, as if they were alone rather than standing in a farmyard in Normandy with a gaggle of journalists and
military types. They talked and the others talked, and Fletcher and I stood silent. He stood watching Liv and Pyle.

  Before I realized what was happening, Fletcher headed toward the highest of the remaining stone walls, making an assault on it in hopes of gaining some visibility in this land of flat fields and high hedgerows. Or trying to impress everyone. Trying to impress Liv, who was so taken with Ernie Pyle. Fletcher got only a few feet up before stones tumbled away under him and he was forced to leap back and off. He landed on his seat in the mud.

  Pyle gave him a hand up.

  The military types discussed moving closer to the Saint-Lô–Périers road that was to be the bombing line. It was marked with long strips of colored cloth laid on the ground, beyond which the planes would be headed. If you stayed behind the cloth line you might be okay. But in the end everyone agreed that we were close enough, that moving closer would be an unreasonable risk to take.

  It didn’t matter. Just as the first of the B-17s dropped their loads, the strike was called back, the day left to the same dull waiting.

  After Liv had gone up to the hayloft that night, Fletcher and I sat side by side against the barn, looking up at the starless sky and sharing a chocolate bar from the rations we’d eaten for dinner. “Sunday,” I said. “My mother had a special milk pitcher we used only at Sunday supper.” The color of Liv’s eyes in the morning, I thought but didn’t say, and I imagined Mama back home where it was so much earlier, kneeling at church without me beside her, without even knowing if I was alive or where I was.

  “It’s Monday, actually,” Fletcher said.

  “Is it really?”

  Fletcher asked, “What will you do when the war is over, Jane?”

  I held the chocolate on my tongue for a long time, trying to sort out an answer that would be true enough.

  “I can’t imagine going back to Nashville,” I said finally, “but I can’t imagine not going back. Mama doesn’t have anyone else.”

  “No chap back there awaiting your return?”

  “If I had a chap I expect I’d be the one awaiting,” I said. “What about you?”

  “No chap awaiting back at home for me either,” he said.

  “Just the schoolgirls whose mothers will have been to visit them yesterday?” Sounding easier than I felt, wanting him to say he had no girl. Two mistresses that Charles knew of—that was what Liv had said. Girls like I supposed I was to Tommy. Like my mother must have been to my father, at best.

  “Elizabeth Houck-Smythe,” Fletcher said finally. Just the one name.

  He offered up no more detail than I’d offered about my missing father, and I wondered why he didn’t. I imagined, too, how sweet he must be with the little girls at his country house, and maybe that was part of it: the one house in London and another in Chichester, houses big enough to host whole school classes of evacuee girls. Not just a neighborhood or a city or a state away from the wrong side of Nashville, but a country on the other side of the world. I’d liked England the time I’d spent there before I shipped off to France. Folks were charmed by the hint of Southern accent I couldn’t manage to shed, and it rained in the same long slow drizzles we got at home and the countryside was just as lush, and yet no one there judged me by who my parents were or were not.

  I said, “I suppose Elizabeth Houck-Smythe . . .” But then Mama’s voice came to me as surely as if she were sitting beside me: If you aren’t the prettiest, you just pretend you are. When had she stopped telling me that? Sometime before the night of Tommy’s engagement party, two hundred guests under the stars on the back lawn and they’d needed extra help, and Mrs. Stahlman had particularly requested me. That cute little daughter of yours, you bring her along to help serve, Mrs. Tyler. But it was Mama herself who had handed me the plates for the bride- and groom-to-be, admonishing me to hold my head up and serve them proper. A rumor makes a reputation, whether it ought to or not. Tommy had sat silently as I served his plate that evening and the next week I’d been offered the books page at his daddy’s paper, where I’d been a typist for years.

  “I suppose Elizabeth Houck-Smythe can burn water,” I said to Fletcher, although, like the Miss Ingrams back home and like Liv, Miss Houck-Smythe didn’t likely need to cook anything.

  Fletcher said, “Of course that’s why I’ve come to France, for the fine dining,” and he offered me another bite of the floury chocolate.

  He extracted from his pocket a photograph of a woman who, in the dim light, looked a bit like me, her light hair in a wave like mine. But pretty, very pretty. He tucked the photograph back into his pocket, then took another bite of chocolate, and chewed it, and swallowed. “Elizabeth was my brother’s girl first,” he said, “before Edward died.”

  Then he was telling me about the last time he’d visited his brother’s grave. Two hours, that was how much notice he’d been given before he was shipped out—more than two hours in the foul weather and he might not be able to take off, his CO had said, and Fletcher had stuffed down the hope that the English weather offered. Two hours left no time for dinner with his parents or drinks with his mates, no showing up drunk at Elizabeth’s, no midnight drive down to Trefoil to watch the evacuee girls sleeping safely in their makeshift beds. Two hours left time enough only to drive to Saint John’s, the Anglican church he’d grown up in. The chapel was empty at least; he was thankful for that.

  He stuffed a one-hundred-pound note into the tin contribution box beside the candles and lit them one at a time. He left the last candle in the front row unlit, and he leaned over the warmth of them, the brightness, not so much praying as letting the past trickle through him: the lavender-water smell of his mother; the warmth of his father’s smooth, strong hands over his own on a cricket bat; the prick of a thorn in the rose garden as he’d stolen his first kiss. If Fletcher’s time was up, he didn’t want the reliving done only in a quick flash as he was dying. He’d had more than his share of good times, he knew that, he appreciated that.

  He took the single unlit candle from its small glass cup and left the church through a side door. He passed sunken tombs tilting at odd angles and grave markers overgrown with creeping vines before climbing the broad steps to the upper cemetery, the hillside. On clear days the sea was visible from up there, but the sun that day was lost behind a thick covering of gray that was not yet a storm. The air was as still and heavy as that in the walled part of the cemetery below, but it wasn’t musty, or dank, or decaying.

  “Edward,” he whispered as he’d done so often late at night from the bed beside his brother’s.

  He sat in the damp grass just in front of the simple stone marker. “I’m off to France, Edward,” he said, pressing a palm flat to the headstone, the carved “Dieppe, France, August 19, 1942.”

  “You’ll have to watch over Father and Mum, Edward,” he said. “And Elizabeth as well.”

  He smoothed the clean white wick of the votive between his finger and thumb, put the candle on the headstone, and used his Zippo to light the wick. A tiny flame struggled against the shade, the dampness, before rising into the grayness, flickering in the soft exhale of his breath.

  To me, he said, “I’m sorry. I oughtn’t be mawkish.”

  “Mawkish.” A word I might have presented proudly to Mama on the trolley home.

  “It’s barmy, I do know that. This idea that a final visit to Edward’s grave might save me from his fate.”

  He offered me another bite of chocolate. I held his hand steady as I put my mouth to the bar, my fingers lingering on his.

  “I have to stay,” he said, “I can manage this when I’m here. It’s the . . . I’m not sure I would be able to make myself come back.”

  “You’ll stay then,” I said.

  He set his hand on mine. “Elizabeth loves chocolate,” he said, leaving me to wonder why boys always counted me as a girl who would listen while they professed to love someone else.

  “When she was pregnant she couldn’t get enough,” he said.

  I shifted uneasily a
gainst the barn, confused. Fletcher was married?

  “It was Edward’s baby,” he said. “She miscarried. She said it was better that way, with Edward dead before either of us could marry her and make it right.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I said.

  He said, “She would have been a good mum, Elizabeth would have been. Edward would have been so much better a father than I.”

  Maybe it was a gift we bequeath to the dead, this idea that they would have been so good at all the things at which we fear we’ll fail.

  He said, “Do you suppose I would love Elizabeth if she loved me?”

  From somewhere beyond the barn, a hoot owl sounded a lonely call into the distant sounds of the guns.

  “Elizabeth doesn’t make love to me,” Fletcher said. “She makes love to the memory of Edward.” He folded the chocolate in its wrapper and tucked it in his pocket. “We both do,” he said, something he’d both known and not known when he was with Elizabeth.

  He took a sip from his canteen. He offered me a sip, and I took it. We sat for a long while, looking out into a night sky devoid of stars.

  “I was in love with a boy from back home,” I said finally. “But he’s a rich boy, and rich Nashville boys don’t marry their maids’ daughters except in the movies, not if their parents have anything to say about it.”

  In the quiet moment that followed, I wondered if my Saks Fifth Avenue uniform and my new hair and my new career fooled anyone.

  “We rich chaps have no sense,” Fletcher said. “And our parents even less.”

  Liv woke with a start later that night, from a nightmare she tried to rid herself of by waking me and explaining it. She’d dreamed a hollow-eyed woman was sweeping glass from a sidewalk, sweeping recklessly, the shards scattering onto a Persian rug that was clearly inside somewhere.

  “An indoor sidewalk, now that would be a nightmare,” I said, trying to make her laugh.

  “I dreamed a baby smiling up at me from the rug crawled right into the spray of glass, and the woman just kept sweeping, sweeping. Then my father in his surgical mask was tending the baby, and the baby died, and it was all over the newspapers but they’d gotten it wrong, they said Daddy had killed the baby when he’d been trying to save her. Then Charles was reading the newspaper, the story about my father. He took off his glasses and his eyes were so frighteningly pale, Jane. Then we were making love, Charles and I were, and I was trying to stop him, I was telling him I had to go to Paris.”