The Race for Paris

by Meg Waite Clayton

  “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.

  Liv 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.

  RAMBOUILLET, FRANCE

  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 p
hotograph 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.

  Liv 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.

  NEAR CERNAY-LA-VILLE, FRANCE

  THURSDAY, AUGUST 24, 1944

  [I]t was Helen Kirkpatrick who read the maps, charted our course, and drove the lead jeep. She loved to sail along so fast, however, that the Colonel was always in a dither, knowing that before the day was over her exuberant little jeep would disappear into the distance and leave the rest of our convoy far behind.

  —Photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White

  Fletcher eased our jeep in at the back of a column of tank-destroyer guns, the soldiers dressed in American army garb but wearing red berets and speaking French—some of Leclerc’s French forces. The road was so thick with military vehicles and men and mud and rain that there was no way to continue. Still, when the column stopped and Fletcher stopped with it, Liv urged him on.

  Fletcher threw the jeep into park and climbed out. “Why don’t you drive, then?”

  Liv climbed from the back into the driver’s seat, shifted into gear and swung wide, off the road and into the mud.

  “You coming, Fletcher?” she called back.

  Fletcher caught up with us, flipped the windshield down flat against the hood, and climbed into the back.

  Liv began to weave through the column, as often as not off the road. We broke free of the olive drab mass and moved up to a still-mobile column of troops. When that column halted we swung wide and surged ahead again. Liv drove swiftly, trying to avoid the worst of the mud and rubble, but with a wildness that was a little frightening.

  The tire went again at Cernay-la-Ville, a village that was little more than a road intersection at an ancient stone church. Liv eased us to a stop beside a spire that had stood for centuries but remained as vulnerable to bombs as the ruin at Saint-Lô where they’d placed Major Howie.

  “Roebuck Tire and Axle at your service,” Fletcher said, the tension seeping out of him as the air seeped from the tire.

  It had stopped raining, at least there was that, and the storm had broken the heat and humidity. We stripped off our ponchos, and Liv cut the patch and handed it to Fletcher, whose easy banter as he pressed the patch and held it to the damaged inner tube eased us all. While they worked, I made notes about the morning: the breakfast, the major in the lobby, the escape in the rain.

  “Livvie,” Fletcher said, “I believe there’s a future for you at the Brooklands racetrack—with a clear course and a pit crew.”

  She lit a cigarette and inhaled.

  He said, “You wouldn’t be dirtying your hands patching tires yourself.”

  Liv looked down at her hands, filthy again despite our bath just the night before. “It feels wrong to have clean hands in this damned war,” she said.

  I looked down at my own hands, remembering how Fletcher said Charles had described Liv, as a woman who photographed like a man but didn’t smoke or curse.

  We continued through Pecqueuse, Limours, and Forges-les-Bains, running parallel to the main German defensive line and forever approaching a medieval stone turret without ever reaching the thing. It was the castle keep at Montlhéry, one of the French soldiers told us. It had guarded the road to Paris from Orleans for centuries of war.

  “The tower, it is where Alfred Cornu measured the speed of light,” the French soldier said, as if the fact of its history gave it strength against the bombs. And perhaps it did. Orly airbase, not far beyond the tower, was seized by the Luftwaffe in ’40, and we’d been bombing the hell out of it since late May, but the Montlhéry tower stood.

  The soldier was from Montlhéry himself, and had meant to study physics at the Sorbonne, before the war. I suggested perhaps he would soon, although it was hard to see how any of us could take up the pieces of the lives we’d abandoned.

  Off in a field to the left, French guns were firing, and word came down the l
ine that their targets were German antitank guns and mortars. We continued up the road, past a twisted wreck of an antitank gun and a German tank engulfed in flames. Several of the townspeople, so thrilled to see Allied troops that they would not be persuaded to stay in their homes, were killed in the shelling, their bodies lying at the roadside, their expressions stunned.

  “All that’s left of the Battle of . . . where the devil are we anyway?” Fletcher said.

  Liv consulted the map. “Longjumeau?” she said, mangling the French.

  “Longjumeau,” Fletcher said. “‘Long’ like ‘long’ in English—it has the same meaning. And ‘jumeau’ means ‘twin.’”

  Evening came with the swishing sounds of shells lighting the starless sky and news that resistance fighters inside Paris had taken the police prefecture on the Île de la Cité. Charles Luizet, who’d been Leclerc’s roommate at the French military academy, had managed to get a wireless message out that the resistance fighters were at the end of their resources, and Leclerc sent a small plane over the city to drop leaflets urging them to hold on.

  “I’d hate to have been that pilot,” I said.

  “I’d hate to be in Paris, hoping for armies or at least arms, only to receive a bleeding leaflet,” Fletcher said.

  “I’d love to be in Paris,” Liv said.

  We declined beds offered us in a cottage that night, wanting to be ever ready. I slept sitting with my bedroll loosely around me in the passenger seat, dreaming I was eating peach ice cream, and woke in the darkness to staccato gunfire and the smell of smoke. Liv woke with a gasp, and I climbed into the small backseat, careful not to wake Fletcher, wedging myself in beside her. She’d been having a nightmare that she’d been arrested, that she was standing in front of a bare metal desk in a dank prison cell, with Mrs. Shipley cackling at her that women didn’t belong in war zones, that she ought to be home tending children. “Then somehow Mrs. Shipley was Charles, and I was back at the field hospital again and Charles was there, hunched over the table under the apple tree, writing and writing. But there was something wrong about it. About the sound of his typewriter. The ding of the bell signaling the carriage return was missing. The zip of the carriage returning was missing as well.”