The Race for Paris (2 page)
Read The Race for Paris Online
Authors: Meg Waite Clayton
Every image he sees, every photograph he takes, becomes in a sense a self-portrait.
—Photojournalist Dorothea Lange
T
he moon over the Hôtel de Ville hangs as round and golden as a C ration can to complete this fairy-tale setting: the clock in the tower striking the half hour; the stone flag bearers rising above slate roofs like egrets poised for flight; and the windows, of course, all those windows leaving guests trying to remember which one, exactly, de Gaulle addressed us from—those of us old enough to remember, anyway. Inside, tuxedoed men and sparkling women will be claiming flutes of champagne. They’ll be toasting
Pushing Against the Fog
, an exhibit of Liv’s photographs taken as she and Fletcher and I crossed Normandy fifty years ago, vying to be the first to report from a liberated Paris—a moment that could make a young journalist’s career. That’s what we were, Liv and I: young journalists. Before the war, I was a typist at the
Nashville Banner
and Liv was in school.
Then Pearl Harbor was bombed and the boys headed for war, leaving girls like us to step into vacated bylines. Women, I perhaps ought to say, but we were girls then in so many ways, as surely as the men who came back, or didn’t, were boys when they left.
Britt, who was sent to collect me for this opening celebration, nods at the clock, to the left of the de Gaulle window. Yes, I do remember which one it was. With my good hand, I smooth a wrinkle in her red silk sheath (vintage, they call it now) as a tour boat passes behind us on the Seine.
“The gown fits you like a thick newspaper fits a Sunday morning, Britty,” I say, although in truth I prefer her usual cargo pants and T-shirts, the vest she wears unless the devil himself is sweating in whatever godforsaken war zone she finds herself. On impulse, I unhook my necklace, a lonely emerald in a circle of diamonds. “You have the better neck for this,” I say, “and I expect it will fit nicely in your field pack after tonight.”
“That necklace wouldn’t last one moment in my pack, nor would my life if I were carrying it!” she responds easily, kicking the possibility of her death high and wide. Does anyone in her twenties imagine herself mortal? In her twenties, as Liv and I were when we met, Liv barely twenty-one and me just a year older.
“Well, I’ll wear it for you tonight,” Britt concedes.
I say, “It’s not too late. We could climb onto one of those tacky tour boats and make a getaway.”
The look she gives me:
No, we can’t; of course we can’t.
Liv’s photos will be here for a month, with crowds lining up (
queuing,
Britt would say) at the side entrance on Rue de Rivoli to see the exhibit and perhaps buy the “companion book,” as if this exhibit came first and the book followed rather than the
other way around. But tonight is for the book, which has been fifty years in the making, fifty years already made if you don’t count finding a publisher and getting the censors to release their sweaty grip.
And it was so long ago—Fletcher and Liv and me. Maybe my guilt isn’t really guilt. Maybe it’s something else, or nothing at all.
M
y eyes haven’t adjusted to the brighter light in the reception hall before the publicist hurries toward us with a gaggle of society reporters in tow. “This is Jane, of course,” she tells them, leaving me no choice but to accept champagne and settle into the wrong side of the interview, answering questions rather than asking them. I pocket my discomfort like an after-dinner mint and try to sound clever for the journalists while “chatting casually” for the photographers, all of whom surely must be more interested in the movie stars and politicians scattered about the room, the computer kids in tuxedos and tennis shoes, the gray-haired Wall Street moguls in proper footwear escorting dates younger even than the computer kids. Copies of the book sit on podiums throughout the hall, not the cover photo I would have chosen but I do understand the choice. A sign points to the room where the photo exhibit begins. Its black lettering reminds me of that on the cave walls during the war,
VERBLYF VOOR 5 PERSONEN
.
Everyone remains huddled out here in the reception hall, though, near the champagne.
A journalist puts a question to Britt about her gown, and she tilts her head to mine to give a better angle on our companion jewelry, her emerald necklace and my matching earrings. Yes, the photographers do like that. They will run us under some caption like “Old Journalism and New, in Gucci
and Gems at the Hôtel de Ville” in the
Times
Sunday style section tomorrow. The
New York Times
, not the London papers. The London papers will already have been put to bed.
Britt negotiates our escape from the press and pulls me into the exhibit room, and there I am in the first photograph, taking aim with a pistol, Fletcher’s arms wrapped around me as he teaches me to shoot.
Britt says, “‘For someone who so obviously loves the feel of a gun in your hand, it’s sad that you’re such a poor shot!’”
“‘Such a
bloody
lousy
shot,’” I correct her, wanting suddenly to tell her about the day Liv took this photograph, about the German boy. But her attention has been caught by the book sitting like a Bible—in the beginning, God created Liv—on a pulpit below the bloody-lousy-with-a-gun photograph. Someone has left it back cover up so that we’re looking not at the front but at a photograph Fletcher took: Liv in military fatigues, standing in that jeep with her Speed Graphic in her hands and her Leica hanging from a camera strap.
They surprise me, these photos do, or the girl I was in them surprises me, the girls Liv and I both were. I didn’t have Liv’s delicate prettiness: her short dark hair and long dark lashes, graceful dark brows, her narrow nose with that odd little bump going down to a fragile tip of chin, her boyish build. Liv’s changeable eyes—the sturdy blue of my mother’s Sunday milk pitcher on a clear morning and something greener and more varied in other light—leave me thinking even now that my own eyes are as plain brown as the trunk of a walnut tree. But in the photo my legs look graceful where I thought them gangly, and my arms, too, my square shoulders. The wave in my bottle-blond hair frames a face that is clear-skinned, that might have been downright attractive if I’d had Liv’s confidence, or perhaps even was.
Britt rights the book and opens it. She flips past the half title page to the title page and the verso with its copyright information and disclaimers, its grateful acknowledgment of permissions to reprint. When she reaches the dedication, she stops turning pages.
“Renny—the Renny the book is dedicated to—isn’t my mother,” she says uncertainly, as if she wants to insist it must be.
I lean close to her, the smooth silk of her gown cooling against my ruined hand as I trace the letters with my good one—the
R
and the
e
, the
n
,
n
,
y
—trying to weave a reply from the threads of hurt: all the days and nights Liv and I shared, the things we did during the war and the things we ought to have; the lives Fletcher and Charles and even Liv knew before the war and my own more circumscribed past; the unspoken words in the years since, the griefs held back out of respect for other, greater griefs. Have we ever spoken the truth about what the war made of us, or who we might instead have become?
To Renny.
So simple, and not.
So you want to go to war? . . . You won’t be very comfortable. Things will happen you won’t like. Do you think you can take it?
—Chief of the War Department’s bureau of public relations’ war intelligence division, speaking to AP journalist Ruth Cowan
I
t was raining again, still raining, the morning I first met Liv. I’d been at the Normandy field hospital for a week, sharing the end tent in the WAC stockade with Marie Page from
Ladies’ Home Journal
—a tent too close to the eight-holer latrine, but we’d been offered no other. Marie and I awoke in our bedrolls underneath our cots to the lousy plunk of rain on the tent canvas, and Liv entering through the door flap. Her poncho streamed water onto the dirt floor that we worked so hard to keep from turning to mud. Already, Marie was scrambling from her bedroll, reaching up to turn on the flashlight we’d strung from a rope across the tent and offering
to help Liv with her rain gear, pulling Liv’s poncho over her head as if she meant only to be hospitable. Underneath the poncho, a lanky tripod hung from a strap at Liv’s shoulders, as did a large-format Speed Graphic camera and a 35mm Leica. The Leica’s chrome was painted a dull black lest it reflect light and draw sniper fire.
“You must be the new girl,” Marie said.
She held Liv’s poncho under the door awning outside and shook off the rain as she introduced herself.
Liv tentatively touched the rope from which the flashlight hung. Like all correspondents, she wore a captain’s uniform for credibility with the soldiers and to convince the Germans we weren’t spies, hers with a
P
for “photographer” on her armband that replaced the original
WC
for “war correspondent” but also for “water closet”—the john, the bathroom, the loo; the Brits had a field day with that. She opened her Speed Graphic and accordioned out the bellows, locked the lens plate down, and took a photograph. Just that: the rope. Not even the flashlight.
“Olivia James Harper, with the Associated Press,” she said. “I go by Liv.”
I pulled my notepad from inside my bedroll and rolled out from beneath my cot, careful to avoid the tentacles of wet dirt left behind by Liv’s poncho. Liv turned her camera to photograph me as I did so, capturing me with tent-floor dirt on my face, morning breath, and my helmet on. Even inside the tent, it was as cold as a slave merchant’s heart.
Liv said, “You sleep underneath your cots?”
“Only when the Germans make night raids,” Marie answered.
“Our sweet German lullaby,” I said. It was surprising how
quickly I’d gotten used to huddling in the slit trench behind the tent when the raids started, and sleeping under my bunk in my fancy four-pound helmet, taking baths out of the same helmet, washing my clothes in the water afterward and hanging them to dry from the tent ropes on the sunny side of the tent when there was sun, which there wasn’t much.
“I’m Jane Tyler, with the
Nashville Banner
,” I said, helping Liv ease off her rucksack and the smaller musette bag.
Liv unstrapped her bedroll and draped it across the cot assigned to her. Marie asked if she needed any help unpacking and, when Liv declined, began to lay out her uniform on her own cot the way she did each morning, as if preparing for a homecoming dance.
“You’re sure you don’t need help?” I asked Liv, but I was already settling cross-legged on top of my cot with my typewriter—a foldable Corona—in my lap. A lead for a story had come to mind as if ducking in with Liv, and the first words of a story are always the hardest to come by, and the most fleeting. I loaded the paper and carbon and tapped out several words, hit the carriage return, and typed the rest of the sentence and the blessed first period. The day was starting to look like a good one despite the rain.
Liv said, “I love the sign, by the way. ‘1st Tent.’”
“Don’t encourage her,” Marie said to Liv.
The sign I’d made from an empty bandage box and hung over our tent door was meant to be funny. At the press camps where our male colleagues were billeted, a “1st Tent” assignment was a mark of prestige. We weren’t allowed at the press camps, though, even for the briefings. “No ladies’ latrines, and we aren’t about to start digging them now” was what we were told, although the press camps in Normandy were set up at swanky French country homes, with indoor plumbing and
fireplaces, on-site censors and telephones and wireless transmission, and good whiskey on tap.
Liv said, “So how do I go about getting the commanding officer’s permission to go to the front?”
“To the front?” Marie repeated.
I said, “You haven’t even unpacked your nightie, Liv.”
Liv eyed my long-handle GI underwear, the bedroll around my legs. I was still thinking of the press camps, wishing not so much for the whiskey (I poured my own generous whiskey rations for the doctors and medics I interviewed) as for the ability to negotiate changes to my pieces with the on-site censors and to make sure my censored copy made sense. Marie’s and my articles went by field messenger service to Price’s gang in London, who wielded their hatchets, stuck the remaining bits back together, and left our names on what was often not quite the truth, and sometimes pure gibberish.
“We’ll never be the first to report from Paris if we’re not at the front,” Liv said. “But if we approach the CO together? How can he say no to all three of us?”
Marie peered suspiciously into each of her boots, stuck a hand into one, and pulled out a snail—which she fussed at for coming in uninvited.
“My editor wants coverage of the field hospital and the boys here,” she said to Liv.
Liv began pulling rolls of film and cut-film holders from her musette bag, the realization dawning: neither Marie nor I had been granted permission to cover the front, or had even asked for it.
“For pity’s sake,” Marie said as she stripped off her long johns and began dressing quickly in the cold. “Why would any decent woman
want
to photograph dead boys?”
Liv watched Marie clip her regulation cotton stockings to her garter belt and try to smooth out the bagginess at her
knees. And I watched Liv watch Marie; I watched Liv absorb Marie’s implication of Liv’s indecency, waiting for Liv’s hurt to work its way into harsh words. She only popped open the Speed Graphic’s back and focused on Marie, though, and handed the camera to me.
“Have a look through the ground glass, Jane,” she said.
The leather, as I put my face to the camera’s viewing tunnel, smelled of the Stahlmans’ library back home: the leather chairs I was not to sit in and the leather-bound books Mama quietly slipped out for me to read, books I took up into the magnolia tree where no one would notice me, or into the garden shed where Old Cooper allowed me to read on rainy days.
Through Liv’s camera lens, Marie appeared upside down—her baggy-stockinged legs feet upward.
“Her editors at
Ladies’ Home Journal
would be appalled!” I said, realizing how silly I, too, must have looked upside down in my helmet and bedroll, underneath my cot.
Liv put her own face to the camera and moved right up to Marie’s baggy-stockinged knees, saying, “‘If your photographs aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough!’” and even Marie giggled.
I suppose I started liking Liv in that moment, with that first glimpse of her humor. Her humor and her mercy, letting Marie and me both off the hook for our cowardice, letting Marie’s charge of indecency stand against her without a word.
“So where, exactly, am I?” Liv asked.
Outside, the rain had let up, the drip on the tent giving way to the chirp of magpies and the rolling whistle of wrens, the peewit of lapwings drawn to the marshes here, even in war.
“You’re a few miles outside of Saint-Lô, the summer home of the German Eighty-fourth Corps,” I said. “Captain Harper, welcome to France.”
L
iv went alone to the CO’s office that morning and waited while he signed papers. She listened mutely when he began to speak, his voice full of the life-is-to-be-endured gruffness of small-town Vermont. She didn’t care, really, that there would be no chitchat, that he didn’t give a blink where she was from or why she was here; he just wanted to make sure she was well acquainted with the rules and wouldn’t get in the way of his doctors. She nodded politely, waiting until he had clearly spoken his piece before she said, “If it’s convenient, sir, I’d like permission to go to the front.”
The CO sat back and crossed his arms, his shirt barely creasing as he stared over his reading glasses. “What’s your assignment, Mrs. Harper?”
“I’m assigned to this field hospital, sir, but—”
“And you’ve been here how long? Two hours?”
The day’s first ambulances were arriving outside, the hurried sputter of engines announcing the day’s first wounded.
“In two hours, Mrs. Harper, you’ve covered everything at this field hospital? My doctors? My nurses? The boys who’ve had their legs sawed off or their eyes taken out, who are lucky enough to be on their way home to wives and mothers and kids who are going to back away from them like they’re god-awful freaks?”
“Well, sir—”
“Can you get them all in the time you’ve got here? Twenty-one days and you go back to London. Your accreditation papers are very clear on that, Mrs. Harper, no matter who your husband is.”
“I understand that, sir,” Liv said, the creep of fear returning: that she would be left forever approaching this war, that it
would end and she would never have gotten to photograph it, much less gotten to Paris. So many months spent arguing with the War Department, the Passport Office, her own husband, for goodness’ sake. Margaret Bourke-White had already flown over Tunis in a lead bomber to photograph exploding landing strips while Liv couldn’t even get a passport. She imagined Bourke-White already in Paris, flown there on a military plane with the six hundred pounds of luggage and three thousand peanut flashbulbs she’d taken to the bombing of Moscow, men in uniform holding her lenses while military officers worked her extra cameras to get every angle of a shot. Although that wasn’t true, and Liv knew it. Bourke-White had been denied even the three weeks in Normandy Liv was given (“too temperamental”), and no one was in Paris; the troops were not much beyond Charlie, Dog, Easy, and Fox—the code names of sections of the invasion beaches that stretched alphabetically across the French coastline, some sections further divided by color designation: Dog Green, Dog White, Dog Red. Everywhere the word “stalemate” was spoken in hushed tones as Allied troops advanced only a hundred yards a day—progress the medics measured in morphine units dispensed, thirty-two grains per hedgerow.
The CO said, “And you want me to free up a jeep and driver, Mrs. Harper, to take you to a front already so covered up with the press that soldiers are tripping over them?”
“Sir,” she said, thinking,
One jeep
. She didn’t need a driver. She could drive herself perfectly well. Thinking the troops would never make Paris in three weeks. Thinking there were doctors and nurses and wounded enough to photograph at home.
“Sir,” she repeated, “even General Eisenhower says public opinion wins wars.”
“Is that why you’re here, Mrs. Harper? To persuade the la
dies back home to spend a little less time rolling their hair and a little more rolling bandages?” He reached for a document and began flipping pages. “Well, I’m sorry to disappoint you, Mrs. Harper, and I’m certainly sorry to disappoint General Eisenhower, but I can’t spare a jeep today.”
O
utside, the ambulances—jeeps fitted with steel frames to carry two stretchers—were stacked three abreast and ten deep. Medics unbuckled the litters and gently unloaded them before the ambulances left again, to return an hour later with more mud on their wheels and more boys with gut or chest wounds, or without legs. Only the worst of the wounded were brought to the field hospitals, boys who might not survive the longer ride to an evacuation hospital farther back from the front, or even the wait for a full ambulance load.
That’s where I found Liv later that morning, standing in front of her Speed Graphic mounted on her tripod, with what looked to be a telegram in her hand. She wasn’t reading it, though. She was looking resolutely at the boys soaking their bandages on litters in the open field as exhausted nurses checked their tags for how much morphine they’d received at the front and gave them sulfa, plasma, antitetanus shots, and sympathetic if hurried smiles.
“Any luck with the CO?” I said, wanting to ask about the telegram—which Liv folded and tucked into her pocket—but not wanting to pry. “I did warn you he’s an old goat, didn’t I?”
She loaded a cut-film holder—two shots—and focused on a wounded German. His knobby wrists extended beyond his outgrown uniform, and he was so rotten with the mud and sweat of having been too long at war that the nurse attending him held her breath.
“They treat Germans here, even before our boys?” Liv asked.
I took out a ration package of Lucky Strikes (“Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco”) and offered her one, which she declined. “If they’re closer to dying,” I said.
She removed her dark slide and took the shot—the terrified boy watching the nurse prepare the morphine needle.
“He thinks it’s poison, Liv,” I explained. “Imagine if you were in a German camp.”
L
iv and I were working together that night in the “operating room”—a relatively well-lit if not much more sterile area set off by mosquito netting at one end of the surgical tent—when I registered the distant sound of the night’s first shells.
One of the nurses I’d come to know, Annette Roberts from Asbury Park, New Jersey, said softly to a boy whose vein she was testing for an IV, “They’re ours, Joey. Those shells are headed for the Germans. Now I need you to make a fist.”
Her white surgical gown was ridiculous against her muddy boots, as was that of a surgeon who gazed at the tent top and said in a Dracula imitation oddly tinged with a Southern accent, “‘Listen to them. The children of the night. What music they make.’” The Count, I nicknamed him, although Mr. Lugosi was tempting, too.
