The Race for Paris

by Meg Waite Clayton

  “That’s what my husband has always thought,” Liv said, “that de Gaulle would liberate Paris, that it would mean the war would be won and anyone who called himself a photojournalist ought to be there.”

  That had been before, though, when she’d first started working for Charles, when she’d been his protégée but not yet his bride.

  “Charles wanted to honeymoon in Paris,” she said, “but of course we hadn’t been able to, not with the war.”

  It seemed that since that moment in the Dives River Liv was forever talking about Charles.

  The threatening rain clouds had brought no relief from the heat and humidity as we entered Rambouillet, just thirty miles outside Paris. Our jeep was large and conspicuous on the town’s narrow cobblestone roads. The shops were all closed and wary, only the occasional flutter of curtains at upper-floor windows. Several journalists loitered outside the high iron gates of the Hôtel du Grand Veneur, a three-story, slate-roofed hotel designated as the press headquarters pending the march into Paris. No troops were anywhere in sight, though. No snowdrop helmets.

  Fletcher pulled into a little forested park off the square and stopped under a low tree—scant protection I supposed was meant not against the Germans but against Major Adam Jones, who might be having a cool drink in the hotel bar. If everyone headed for Paris was coming through Rambouillet, we wouldn’t be hard to find.

  Behind us and about a hundred yards farther on, a wide channel of water beckoned, peaceful and cool. On a church spire up a narrow lane in the opposite direction, an ivory clock face between the bell chamber and the peaked slate roof clicked off minutes, as if meaning to hurry us along before Paris went up in flames. The church’s stained-glass windows would cast a forgiving light inside. There would be an old wooden confessional with a private little bench retreat, a priest to slide the confessional door open and murmur low French words inviting me to set down my sins, lest I die here with a mortal stain on my soul.

  Liv and I waited and watched through the low branches as Fletcher sussed out the situation, then waved us over. One of the journalists, as we joined them, was saying de Gaulle was back in France for the first time in four years.

  “Jolly good of him to show up,” Fletcher said.

  “He spoke in Rennes to a square overflowing with people despite a pouring rain,” the journalist said. “There wasn’t room to raise an umbrella.”

  “The man was stiff as a board, speech-wise—that’s what MacVane told me,” another said. Then to me, “You know him, Miss Tyler? The NBC radio fellow?”

  I had no idea how the journalist knew my name.

  I glanced to the church again, the comfort of a confessional giving way to the threat of German snipers. The spire would be where they watched our arrival, if they did. Had the Germans all fled, or were they waiting for better prey than a few journalists before they showed their hand?

  The first journalist said, “But the crowd was screaming for de Gaulle, who commanded everyone to sing the ‘Marseillaise.’” The emotion of the moment washed up in his sweaty face as he shared the details: de Gaulle’s single voice singing the opening phrase of the French anthem to the crowd in the square and the hundreds more who’d climbed onto the roofs of bombed-out buildings to see him; French soldiers standing guard over the scene with their new American carbines slung over their shoulders; the crowd joining the singing, the hope they’d hidden during four years of German captivity finding voice in the forbidden song.

  “Some of your lady reporter friends were there,” the man continued. “Iris Carpenter and Catherine Coyne. Virginia Irwin. Sonia Tomara.”

  “And Helen Kirkpatrick?” Liv asked.

  We’d heard a rumor that the Chicago Daily News London bureau chief had gained Eisenhower’s blessing to go wherever she wanted, that she’d gone to see him after the German V-1s started dropping on England and told him that since London wasn’t safe she ought to be sent to France.

  Fletcher said, “Rennes was liberated before the women were allowed in, Liv. Lee Miller is there, too.” He paused for emphasis, wiping the sweat from his brow with a sleeve. “Under house arrest.”

  The Vogue reporter had gone to Saint-Malo when she heard the fighting was over only to find it wasn’t over, bullets were still whizzing through the air.

  “No women permitted in combat zones,” Fletcher said, “or even in zones they fail to realize are still combat zones.”

  I startled at the sound of military vehicles rumbling up the cobblestones—a reconnaissance group sent ahead toward Paris by General Leclerc returning from beyond the town, French troops who wouldn’t give a blink about Liv and me. They’d lost one soldier, and a second had a bullet in his arm. The road to Paris was not yet clear.

  Leclerc’s tanks began rolling up the main road and pulling off into the reserve in which we’d left our jeep. Soldiers climbed from their vehicles and removed their helmets to relieve the heat. Several American officers sped into town, and Liv and I ducked into the gated courtyard of the hotel, melting into the doorway.

  We might be caught, taken into custody, sent back to the States—here, just outside of Paris.

  The Americans didn’t stop, though. Arresting us was someone else’s job. They sped right out the other way, only to return just as the French had, having found the road to Paris remained in German hands.

  One of the French soldiers told us we might find Leclerc at the château. We walked with the other journalists toward several brick chimneys rising above a slate roof as if daring the bombers to try. A small lane off the main road led to guard towers and gates and a turreted limestone castle. A note on the door announced the château was reserved for General de Gaulle.

  We found Leclerc in the gardens, poking at a path with his cane, oblivious of the walkways and balustrades and statuary inviting strollers toward the ponds we’d first seen from the park. The general wore his kepi and a pale, tightly knotted tie despite the heat. His stunted mustache was as precisely sculpted as the garden’s carefully squared-off trees.

  His troops had come too far too fast, he told us. They were not ready to go into battle. And the armistice had been broken. The Germans were going to fight.

  Several of the correspondents badgered him for the details of his plan, but he demurred, saying we were only looking for a story. His concern was the liberation of France.

  We would have been too conspicuous at the official press headquarters even if we were allowed entrance, so we found a cozier family inn just outside of town, where Liv and I were given a tiny, hot attic room and a private bath with a real porcelain tub, big and deep—unfathomable luxury. A crystal jar on a table beside the tub held bath salts, an indulgence I’d not known even before the war. There were two of us, though, and a single tub, and the nagging memory of signs over hotel bathtubs in London: “The Eighth Army crossed the desert on a pint a day. Three inches only, please.” Even the king of England had a low fill line painted on his tub and bathed just once each week.

  Liv uncapped the crystal jar and smelled the salts.

  “Your three inches and mine would make six,” I said, “which with our bodies added might actually fill the tub.”

  “And would save us from having to knock each other over in the fight to bathe first.”

  We’d been through so much together that it seemed nothing, really, to add bathing in a real tub to the list of things we’d shared.

  I said I needed to do my roots first.

  “‘For pity’s sake, can anyone self-apply that stuff?’” Liv said.

  “Remember how Marie used to lay her clothes out so neatly on her cot every morning?” I said, and we laughed as we unbuckled our boots and stripped off our khakis and blouses and underwear, letting it all fall to the floor.

  Liv applied the bleach for me, and I turned the tap—in the middle of one side rather than at the tub’s end—until the water was streaming. Liv poured out a handful of the salts, and we sank in with our backs at opposite ends. I lay in the water, r
emembering a house we’d stopped at to trade for supplies, where they’d had the foresight to fill their bathtub with water—all they would have to drink for weeks, their water and electricity lost in the Allied bombing and the brutal German retreat. I tried to imagine the fancy floors of the Belle Meade mansions back home under German boots, and Mama keeping our own little bathtub full of water, hiding resistance fighters and knowing we would die if they were found. Maybe that wouldn’t be more dangerous than what I was doing, running around Normandy in broad daylight, but I couldn’t have borne living with the possibility of being discovered and tortured into implicating those I loved.

  I soaped Liv’s hair, scrubbing out the thick dirt of the road, of sleeping in trenches. Liv lay back in the bathwater to rinse, and she soaped my hair and I rinsed, and she soaped it again to make sure she’d gotten all the bleach out. When we climbed from the tub, finally, I caught Liv’s reflection in the small mirror over the sink. Her shoulders seemed bonier and whiter, her collarbones sharper than they seemed in their unreflected reality. Even her face was sharper and something more, too, something that left her barely recognizable as the person who’d arrived at the field hospital just weeks ago.

  We were clean, though, for the first time in weeks, and with a four-poster bed instead of our bedrolls to sleep in, too.

  We put on our freshest clothes—damp, but not soaking—and brushed our wet hair and our teeth. We rinsed our extra fatigues and underwear in the bathwater, then hung some in the bathroom and the rest from the long, leaded-glass dormer window, not sure whether to hope for the rain to hold off long enough for our clothes to dry a little or to wish our clothes be drenched if only a good solid rain would bring relief from the heat. We left the blackout shade up for whatever little breeze might cool the room, and we headed down to join Fletcher, who had promised to find us a bottle of wine, or at least a little eau-de-vie.

  The small, candlelit dining room overflowed with correspondents who’d pushed tables together to accommodate large groups. In the middle, a bronze woman sat naked on a bronze jug, her graceful shoulders turned to an old man carved in stone as, above them, a cluster of cherubs laughed and sang. The stone walls and stone floor of the room kept it cooler than our top-floor bedroom despite the crowded tables buzzing with talk of history in the making, full-page headlines, and special editions. Fletcher, freshly shaved and with his hair still damp, stood and waved to us, and we set off toward him, stopping as we crossed the room to acknowledge hellos, to laugh off smart remarks about us being “wanted women,” and to exchange excited and contradictory speculation: the Germans were reinforcing the ring around Paris; the German commander wanted to surrender to the Americans; Leclerc’s French forces alone would enter the city; the French and the American forces would enter together, but the Germans would destroy Paris before they would give it up.

  “We are going to be the first correspondents into Paris,” Liv and I insisted, but of course so did everyone else.

  Fletcher, sitting at a table of journalists, pulled out chairs for us, and I sat facing him while Liv took the seat beside him. He introduced us to the others—all British journalists—and sat only after we’d sat, laughed only as we laughed at the banter about how they’d thought we were just a legend, and how we made them look bad by staying forever at the front. One of our old poker pals from the Saint-Lô–Périers road games asked for a rematch and told us where the game would be after dinner if we wanted to play. All the while, Fletcher’s gaze shifted uncomfortably around the dining room—looking for MPs, I realized. We were quiet and discreet compared to the Americans at the table behind Liv and Fletcher, but they had no AWOL women sitting with them.

  I leaned across the table toward Fletcher and said, “Don’t worry, they have ladies’ latrines here, after all.”

  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.