But this isn’t my book; this is Liv’s book that I’ve put together, her photographs with my words only to put them in context. The Renny to whom the book is dedicated isn’t ours.
Charles takes the book from Liv’s brother and runs his finger over the printed name, a caress, almost the way I used to touch Renny’s hair when she was sleeping, the way I used to remove her thumb from her mouth and, later, Britt’s.
“Renata was a dream,” he says, “something Olivia thought she wanted, a way she imagined herself.” He sighs, his eyes through the eyeglasses shrunken, uncertain. “But what Olivia wanted was to take photographs.”
I look to the first photo in the exhibit again, Fletcher teaching me to shoot. I remember Liv aiming the Webley at the cigarette butt on the road. Liv floating in the murky water of the Dives. Scooping up her poker winnings, handing the Luger back to the American boy with the bike. Watching the blackened airman falling through the sky, the horses, the woman having her head shaved. Hank Bend in his raincoat. The child born in the cave, who was Britt’s mother, the child Fletcher and I went back to find after the war, in the spring of 1946. The child who helped us mend our hearts, only to break them again the day Britt was born. Our daughter, like her mother, did not survive the birth of her child.
I remember Liv asleep in our foxhole on that last morning outside Valkenburg, the day our daughter’s first mother died, and Liv died, too. Liv’s slender fingers lost in gloves of a red leather as soft as the silk of the gown Fletcher found in Liv’s rucksack that night, after the world had changed. The gown and the gloves that Fletcher quietly kept when Liv’s things were returned to Charles, that he tucked beside the single shot of Liv in the bottom of his own pack, and took with him to his brother’s grave when at last the war was done, and kept all the years of our marriage until, finally, he gave the gown to Britt. Only the gown, not the gloves. Somehow, neither of us can part with Liv’s gloves.
I run a hand over the book myself, wanting to say something to ease Charles’s loss the way putting this book together has eased mine, the way all the years of my loving Fletcher have eased my husband’s pain and allowed him to return my love. But I don’t say anything. I slip my hand into Britt’s, wanting the warmth of my granddaughter’s touch, the certainty.
Liv was close enough, after all. I was close enough, too, because I went with her. But I can’t speak for Liv any more than Charles can. Any more than Fletcher or Geoff. None of us can know, really, who Liv’s Renny might have become, or what Liv knew or wanted or why she made the choice she did to go into Valkenburg that morning; whether she would have chosen differently if she’d had more time to consider what she was risking, or if she’d had all the time she needed, if she’d been making that choice every morning of the war. All we can do is let Liv’s photos speak for her now, and for us, too. Her faces looking straight into ours. Shades of gray. Of black. Of a misty, unforgettable white.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Although Jane, Liv, and Fletcher are all fictional characters and this novel is a work of fiction, I have relied heavily on actual experiences of journalists and others for inspiration and for many of the book’s details. The novel perhaps was born the moment I read about “Patricia,” the imaginary daughter to whom Margaret Bourke-White and Erskine Caldwell dedicated You Have Seen Their Faces. The “Operating Room by Flashlight” scene was inspired by a short passage in Bourke-White’s Portrait of Myself about a night at a field hospital in Italy; thanks to the Vanderbilt University library for allowing me to spend so many hours there reading it, and to the late Dr. Phillip Davidson for arranging that.
My apologies to the unnamed photographer whose photograph ran on so many front pages of American newspapers on August 25, 1944, for conscripting the photo, modifying it to fit my purposes, and moving it across the Seine.
The late Annette Roberts Tyler’s personal recollections of her time “over there” inspired the character Jane, who, as might be expected of a character inspired by my aunt, refused to be left behind when Liv left the field hospital, and so charmed her way into a much bigger role than I meant for her.
Julia Edwards’s Women of the World: The Great Foreign Correspondents was a terrific introduction to the real-life women who inspired this story. Nancy Caldwell Sorel’s The Women Who Wrote the War not only was a fascinating read, but also led me to many other sources, including Catherine Coyne’s “Miss Coyne Joins WACs in Invasion” from the July 12, 1944, Boston Herald. Other early sources of inspiration included Robert Capa’s Images of War and John MacVane’s On the Air in World War II (an incredible firsthand account of the liberation of Paris from a correspondent’s view). Cornelius Ryan’s Collier’s article titled “The Major of St. Lô” and Andy Rooney’s My War account of the same moment were indispensible for the Saint-Lô scene, as was Ernie Pyle’s reporting from the Saint-Lô–Périers road—“A Ghastly Relentlessness,” “The Universe Became Filled with a Gigantic Rattling,” and “Anybody Makes Mistakes”—for the short-bombing scenes.
The details of the blowing of the bridge in Valkenburg come from a piece I found online, “Verzet van Pierre Schunck en de zijnen” (“The Resistance of Pierre Schunck and His People”) by Arnold Schunck, whose father, Pierre Schunck, operated in the Dutch resistance under the pseudonym “Paul Simons”; from early e-mails with Sheila Knight and Laury Watervoort, who were kind enough to answer my questions; and from my visit to Valkenburg and the caves, which Tihana made much easier by the simple act of holding our bags.
Thanks to James Hamel at the Vouilly Château (once a World War II press camp, now a delightful inn) for his hospitality, knowledge, and photography skills. The staff at the Hôtel Scribe in Paris allowed me to poke around in the hotel of today, and helped flesh out my journey through their past with Pierre-André Hélène’s L’Hôtel Scribe: une légende au coeur de Paris. There has never been a better tire-patch gang than Barney Rickman and Don Vantrease. And thanks to Jean Kwok and Erwin Kluwer for help with my Dutch, Ben Lanail with my French, and my brother David with my German.
I was also helped by Anne Kasper’s April 3, 1990, interview of Helen Kirkpatrick; Peter Prichard’s “Front Lines and Deadlines: A View from the War Zones” interview of Martha Gellhorn; Virginia Cowles’s Looking for Trouble; Stephen Ambrose’s Citizen Soldiers; the Smithsonian’s Reporting the War: The Journalistic Coverage of World War II; The Second World War: Original Recordings from the BBC Archives; Shelley Saywell’s Women in War; Martin Blumenson’s Liberation; Sean Callahan’s The Photographs of Margaret Bourke-White; Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre’s Is Paris Burning?; Max Hastings and George Stevens’s Victory in Europe; Judy Barrett Litoff and David C. Smith’s We’re in This War, Too: World War II Letters from American Women in Uniform; Peter Maslowski’s Armed with Cameras: The American Military Photographs of World War II; Susan D. Moeller’s Shooting War: Photography and the American Experience of Combat; Jonathan Silverman’s For the World to See: The Life of Margaret Bourke-White; James Tobin’s Ernie Pyle’s War; Vicki Goldberg’s Margaret Bourke-White; Antony Penrose’s The Lives of Lee Miller; Caroline Moorehead’s Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life and Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn; A. J. Liebling’s “Letter from France” series from The New Yorker; Andrew Mollo’s The Armed Forces of World War II: Uniforms, Insignia and Organization; and the New York Times archives, especially those from the summer of 1944. Sources I came to late in the writing, but which also proved helpful, include Carolyn Burke’s Lee Miller and Michael Neiberg’s The Blood of Free Men. I hate to think how many sources I turned to that I have failed to mention.
Tatjana Soli and her stunning The Lotus Eaters inspired me to persist. Ilsa Brink worked her web miracles yet again. Other friends and family who provided much-needed comfort and relief in less writerly ways include the extended Waite and Clayton gangs (special thanks to Ashley for all she does for me, to Emma for the pencil case that makes me smile every time I pull out a pen or pencil, and to Sadie for hanging out at bookstores with
me); Fred, Laird, and the Santa Barbara gang; my WOMBA and poker pals; Grace; Gayley; Eric and Elaine; Camilla and Dave; Debby and Curtis; John and Sherry; Darby and Sheri; and last, but certainly not least, Jenn, Mom and Dad, and Chris and Nick. Without their good company, good humor, and the occasional much-needed good meal, I would long ago have taken Fletcher’s Webley and shot the hell out of this manuscript.
Friends and teachers who read this manuscript over the many years I have been working on it include Madeleine Mysko, Leslie Lytle, Dan Levin, Ellen Sussman, Kate Brady, and Anna Waite. Tim O’Brien will long ago have forgotten the early encouragement that I won’t ever forget. And Mac Clayton and Brenda Rickman Vantrease read draft after draft of this one, over more than a decade, and never wavered in their enthusiasm. Mac doubled as my intrepid traveling companion; it would be a much poorer story but for his questioning, his willingness to stray well off the usual tourist routes, his ten-mile-plus walking range, and his excellent driving skills.
The ever-amazing Marly Rusoff became a convert when I might finally have given up on this one, and helped me find the gumption to stick by it. I am truly forever in her debt, and in Michael Radulescu’s, too.
Hannah Wood, Katie O’Callahan, Rachel Elinsky, and Mary Beth Constant are lovely to work with, as is everyone at HarperCollins. Thanks also to Alison Forner for the stunning cover, and Bill Ruoto for the gorgeous internal design. And Claire Wachtel gave this book life, and so much more. Through her gentle questioning, her extraordinary wisdom, her unwavering expectation that this book could be even better and that I was up to the task, and her blessedly stubborn refusal to accept less than the best I could do, this is so much stronger a book than it would have been. I’ve grown immensely as a writer in the time I’ve had the privilege of working with her.
Claire and Marly, I wish I could come up with some more brilliant way to say thank you; this book has been close to my heart for a long, long time, and I am so very grateful for this chance it may have to find its way into readers’ hearts as well.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MEG WAITE CLAYTON is the New York Times bestselling author of four previous novels: The Four Ms. Bradwells; The Wednesday Sisters; The Language of Light, a finalist for the Bellwether Prize; and The Wednesday Daughters. She’s written for the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Jose Mercury News, Forbes, Runner’s World, and public radio. A graduate of the University of Michigan Law School, she lives in Palo Alto, California.
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ALSO BY MEG WAITE CLAYTON
The Wednesday Daughters
The Four Ms. Bradwells
The Wednesday Sisters
The Language of Light
CREDITS
Cover design by Alison Forner
Cover photographs: © Everett Collection/Shutterstock (woman); © AKG-images (map)
COPYRIGHT
This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.
THE RACE FOR PARIS. Copyright © 2015 by Meg Waite Clayton. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Clayton, Meg Waite.
The race for Paris : a novel / Meg Waite Clayton. — First edition.
pages ; cm
EPub Edition August 2015 ISBN 9780062354655
ISBN 978-0-06-235463-1 (hardcover)
I. Title.
PS3603.L45R33 2015
813’.6—dc23
2014045383
15 16 17 18 19 OV/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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