The Race for Paris (24 page)

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 1944

No one ever understood disaster until it came.

                    
—Journalist Josephine Herbst

T
he explosion was still overwhelming Fletcher, the shrapnel and earth and the stone of the bridge improbably filling the air as he shouted, “Jane! Jane!” Then, “We need a medic here!”

Something hit his bare hand, stinging like a bullet. He fell sideways with the force of it, and there was Liv, too. “Liv!” he said. “Oh, Livvie.”

He crouched beside Liv, his hand dripping blood on her helmet as he cried, “Medic! We need a medic here!”

Blood soaked the arm of her blouse.

He pulled out his shirttail, tried to tear it for a tourniquet. The damned fabric wouldn’t tear.

He unbuckled his utility belt. Yanked it off. It fell to the ground with the weight of the things clipped to it.

A soldier beside him, staying low to the ground as shots rang out, said, “Jesus.”

Fletcher tried to rip the things from the belt. He threw it aside and pulled off the belt securing his trousers. Wrapped it around Liv’s arm almost at the shoulder. Pulled it tight.

“Liv,” he said. “It’s okay, Livvie, I’m here, I’m going to take care of you, you’re going to be fine.”

He secured the belt as tightly as he could, but the bleeding didn’t stop.

His camera lay on the ground by the wall. Liv’s was closer, half under her leg. He grabbed it and wrapped the thin leather of the camera strap above the belt on her arm, a double strap because that was quicker than trying to unhook it from the camera. He pulled it much tighter than the belt.

“You’re going to be fine, Liv,” he said again.

He turned her slightly toward him so he could see the right side of her face. “Are you okay? Does that hurt too much? Can I turn you over? Can we get you back to the wall?”

One eye fluttered open and looked up at him, the shocking blue iris tucked into the corner, the lash blinking.

He touched her shoulder, eased her gently onto her back.

The soldier beside him gasped.

Fletcher took in the blood-covered front of Liv. Some part of her that ought to have been inside her was not.

“Get a fucking medic,” he said in a low voice to the soldier.

The soldier just stood there, staring.

“Get a medic! Get a bloody fucking stretcher!”

The boy ran off in the direction of the archway.

Liv looked up with both eyes—a vague, faraway stare.

“Don’t worry, Liv,” Fletcher said, focusing on her face framed by the helmet, unable to look at the rest of her.

“You’re going to be fine, Liv,” he said. “We’re getting you help.”

“Fletcher,” she said.

“Shhh, Livvie, shhh,” he said. “Look at me, Livvie. Don’t talk. Save your strength.”

He slid his hands under her and lifted her, trying to ignore her gasp.

She seemed to weigh almost nothing, to almost not exist.

He ran with her in his arms, crouching along the low wall, the damned camera dangling from her arm where the strap was tied hammering his shin. He carried her into the hotel, the family not anywhere in sight, hidden in the safety of the basement. He pushed out backward through the front door of the hotel and under the archway.

The medic came, finally, a medic in a raincoat, rushing toward them, reaching them just on the other side of the archway, where there was a little more protection from the gunfire that continued in the wake of the bridge explosion. The medic came with a stretcher, which he set on the cobblestones.

Fletcher lay Liv down on the stretcher.

The medic cut a big slice of his raincoat and laid it over her gut. He administered a shot of morphine. He and Fletcher covered her with a blanket. Lifted the stretcher. Loaded Liv into an ambulance-jeep.

“We’re getting you back to the aid station,” Fletcher said. Then to the driver, “What the hell are you waiting for?”

The driver nodded in the direction of the archway. “There’s one more coming, sir.”

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 1944

It is awful to die at the end of the summer when you are young and have fought a long time . . . and when you know the war is won anyhow.

                    
—Journalist Martha Gellhorn

F
letcher loomed above me. I tried to hold on to that: the moss-brown eyes, the gray hair. The movement of clouds above him nauseated me and I wanted to vomit, and I didn’t want him to see me vomit but there was nothing I could do.

“Raphs,” a voice said, not Fletcher’s voice. Liv lying beside me.

“Shhh,” Fletcher said. “Don’t talk, Livvie. We’re getting you to the aid station. Just hold on. We’re almost there.”

I wanted to help her. I wanted to say she was trying to tell Fletcher about the photographs. She was worried about losing the photographs. Of course she was. But I had no words, no voice.

“Fletch,” she said as I struggled to keep my focus on the reality of Fletcher’s eyes.

“Shhh,” he said, to her or to me or to both of us. “Shhh.”

I felt the tingling beginnings of relief.

“Raphs,” Liv repeated.

“Shhh,” he said to her. “Shhh. There’s an army regulation against . . .”

Dying.
There was an army regulation against dying if you made it alive to an aid station.

He leaned closer to her, tears clearing paths down his dirty cheeks.

I couldn’t feel one of my own hands at all, and the other felt weighted down with concrete, sunk in a mucky mire far from my waist.

“Renny,” Liv whispered.

Fletcher leaned even closer to Liv, to her closed eyelids, the little bump on her nose. “You’re going to be fine, Liv,” he said forcefully, as if the power of his will could save her. He moved the camera tied to her arm out of the way so he could get closer to her. “You’re going to be fine.”

I wondered if my own skin was that pale, my own lips that blue.

“Where is the bloody aid station?” Fletcher said to the driver or to Liv or to no one at all. “Why is it taking so damned long to get there?”

He circled his arm around the top of Liv’s head and stroked her hair as he must have done that one starless night outside Paris.

“It’s okay. You’re going to be fine, Livvie,” he said again, his voice pleading now.

Liv, still with her eyes closed, whispered, “. . . so cold, Daddy.” Her face some colorlessness paler than white. “. . . so cold.”

SATURDAY, AUGUST 20, 1994

I am pushing against the wall which is fog and therefore gives and swallows and cannot be pushed. For I am trapped with the puzzle of overcoming war. Dimly, I see my direction, but cannot see the footing, and so far am faltering, and marking time, and bluffing—and failing.

                    
—Photojournalist W. Eugene Smith

B
ritt’s hand settles on my arm as Fletcher heads toward us, his tie tied just a little too precisely, as if he’s pulled it from a field pack and ironed it into submission—or close enough to submission that a precise tying might finish the job.

“You’re here!” he says, kissing first Britt and then me. “Sorry, the flight was beastly late.” He borrows Britt’s champagne long enough to clink the glass to mine. “To
Pushing Against the Fog: The Photographs of Olivia James Harper.
”

The book has gotten this far, through the miles of red tape to retrieve the censored photos—most of Liv’s photos—from the American government, and through meetings with dozens
of publishers before persuading one to take on the book. Without the promise of this splashy launch, there might have been no
Pushing Against the Fog
. Liv’s photographs are incredible, yes, the publisher had said, but no one has heard of Olivia Harper in years. If it weren’t for the one photo that became so well known—the Paris liberation shot, which wasn’t attributed to Liv until after the war was over—there might have been no book even with Fletcher’s influence, his introductions. Liv’s death in the fall of 1944, “unfortunate as it was,” made it off the obituary page only in the newspaper her husband ran.

I can almost forgive Charles, for having at least allowed Liv that dignity.

I wonder if church bells rang at her funeral. Neither Fletcher nor I had been there. I was in the hospital, and Fletcher was in the Netherlands, or perhaps in Germany by then, improbably carrying on. Charles alone had buried Liv—Charles who is approaching us now in the exhibit hall, a sad old tuxedo hanging crookedly from his uneven shoulders, one lower than the other as if he’s carried the weight of everything he’s endured in that one hand. The publicist told me he planned to come, and yet I’m surprised he has.

Charles greets Fletcher as if they are old friends, as if they last spoke only days ago rather than going on fifty years.

Fletcher sighs, and smiles, and says, “Charles,” and I can see in his tired eyes that he’s pushing back the urge to bash in Charles’s nose as surely as I’m pushing back the nagging idea that a scene here between the septuagenarian widowed husband and the man Liv was traveling with at the time of her death might gain the book a trove of publicity. Liv, though, would never have forgiven anyone for gaining her publicity like that.

“So how have you been, old man?” Charles says to Fletcher.

“Charles, you know Jane,” Fletcher says, although in fact
Charles and I have never met; we’ve only communicated through lawyers for the requisite permissions from the estate of Olivia James Harper, trusteed by the widowed Charles.

He’s never remarried, Charles hasn’t.

“And this is our Britt,” Fletcher says—our Britt, because calling her our granddaughter belies the fact that we raised her.

As Britt shakes Charles’s hand, Fletcher looks away, to the book on the stand, the jacket cover photo of the woman celebrating atop the car in front of the barricade, her face looking straight into the camera, not angled even an inch. Charles was wrong in not running that photograph in his paper. Liv was wrong in thinking she’d not captured the truth of the liberation of Paris, the truth of the war. The thin shoulders in the flowered dress. The sharp brow bone and dark brows and blue-green irises—an intense color suggested even in the black and white photograph—against the determined white of the woman’s clear eyes. Eyes that are full of tossed flowers and double kisses and champagne, babies held high to witness, yes. But eyes bathed, too, in loss. It’s a plain, beautiful face haunted with the truth of what one person will do to another with only the excuse of war. It seems a different photograph than the one I first saw in the newspapers at the Hôtel Scribe. Perhaps I hadn’t looked closely enough that morning, or perhaps something had been lost in the transfer from film to newspaper print.

“Charles,” Fletcher says again, unable to cough out the words he surely knows he ought to say: how good it is to see him after all this time or some similar drivel.

But Charles is already saying the words himself, and two other men are joining us, one my age and one Britt’s.

Charles is saying to Fletcher and me, “You haven’t met Geoffrey, have you?”

The eyes—Liv’s eyes—meet mine.

“Geoffrey James, Olivia’s brother,” Charles is saying as I try to absorb the shock of seeing those eyes again.

“You have your sister’s eyes,” Fletcher stammers, placing his hand lightly on Britt’s back as if to support her, although it’s himself he soothes with the touch.

I set my champagne down and extend my good hand to Geoff, saying, “Your sister spoke so often of you.”

I think to say something about being sorry to have missed Liv’s funeral all those years ago, but this twin brother of Liv’s missed it, too. He’d slipped into the Netherlands in July to prepare the way for Operation Market Garden and been captured. He wasn’t known to be alive until Russian soldiers liberated his camp days before the end of the war. We’d tracked down his story after the peace. Fletcher had meant to write him, to share with him something of his sister’s last days. It was what one of Edward’s war buddies had done for Fletcher. But I had been the one to compose that letter, with Mama writing the words I couldn’t write with my own hand. That had been at Trefoil Hall.

Charles introduces the younger man as Geoff’s grandson Jeremy, then says to Jeremy, “This is Fletcher’s granddaughter, Britt, the one . . .” Charles takes his glasses off and wipes them clean on the pleats of his tuxedo shirt, then puts them back on. “The one who took the photo I showed you at dinner,” he says.

With that gesture, I blink against the tears welling in my eyes, the prick of pride at my granddaughter’s talent mingling with the memory of Liv’s voice as we’d looked out from that hayloft into one of so many nights unblessed by the moon. Liv describing how Charles would take off his glasses and clean them, how she lived for the approval he delivered in that sim
ple gesture, the judgment that her photos were good. I hear Liv saying Fletcher had two mistresses—two that Charles
knew
of—although of course Charles had been mistaken, or worse. Fletcher was loyal to Elizabeth until he met Liv. He might have remained loyal to Elizabeth even then if Liv hadn’t come to him. I think he might have remained loyal to Elizabeth after the war, too, but she chose a new love and new memories over holding on to the past with a man whose brother she’d loved.

Geoff’s grandson Jeremy takes Britt’s hand and holds it a moment longer than you might expect, as if he knows my granddaughter through the single photograph of hers Charles has shown him.

“Jeremy James?” Britt says in her warm, easy voice, and she says she read a piece about him not long ago. He’s of the young computer-whiz variety, apparently, but with the decency to wear proper shoes.

“The piece reminded me of Grandma Jane’s writing,” she says in a tone that conveys admiration for the writer, if perhaps not for Jeremy himself—words that take me aback a little. When has Britt read my writing? I lost the use of my right hand at Valkenburg and never wrote again, not until Britt brought me a small cassette Dictaphone like the one she uses to document her photos. “Record your stories, Grandma,” she said. “I know you don’t want to, I know you never talk about what the war was like, but would you do it for me?”

No one but my typist and my editorial team has read any of the little bits I recorded, this book of Liv’s photos in mind even when I started. Not until today. Britt has been overseas for her own work, and I don’t suppose Fletcher will ever read what I’ve written for this book. I don’t suppose he’ll ever look at Liv’s photographs beyond the ones he can’t avoid seeing
tonight. He does like that one photo of me learning to shoot, the bloody-lousy-with-a-gun photograph. But he says he prefers to look to the future, and I say I understand, which I do, somehow.

Still, Fletcher picks up the book and runs a hand over it as if he might touch Liv that way, touch the woman who took that photograph. He turns to the back cover, to the photo of Liv standing in Hank Bend’s ambulance-jeep with her Speed Graphic in her hands and her Leica hanging from a camera strap, Liv watching as Major Howie’s flag-draped corpse on the door stretcher was placed on the pile of cathedral rubble at Saint-Lô. Fletcher had taken this shot of Liv before we’d seen him on that day we went AWOL. Just the single shot. Then he’d removed the roll from his camera and carried it with him, undeveloped, all the way to Berlin.

“She was Mutt to your Jeff, that’s what Liv told me,” I say to Geoffrey.

He smiles at this little bit of memory of his sister. “No, she didn’t much like to be called Mutt.”

She chose Holland over Germany because of you
, I want to say but don’t.

I’m so sorry
, I want to say.

Fletcher says, “Your sister was one of the most incredible women I’ve ever met.”

Geoffrey’s gaze drops to the parquet wood floor, and he smiles sadly. Nods to me. “I appreciate what you’ve done here, Jane, getting her photographs . . . this book . . .”

The sounds of the crowd in the next room mingle with our silence: a lady’s titter, a man’s more forceful laugh, the tink of glass with glass. I look to Liv’s brother, wanting to see those eyes again. Wanting to tell him that the photograph I’d wanted for the cover was the last one she’d taken, in Valkenburg. A photo
graph of a German boy alerting his fellow soldiers to blow the bridge he himself was still on, turning back to try to identify the source of the danger even as he moved to flee. A photograph of a single Nazi soldier, his gaze caught straight on, with no shadow. An impossibly young man doing what was expected of him so that he could go home to a mundane life, to his mother, perhaps to a wife and children. A boy doing his job with courage, or perhaps with bravery, photographed by Liv doing her job in the same way, in the moment before they both died.

Geoffrey looks up, finally. Clears his throat. “Jane, could I . . . May I ask you one thing?”

The striking eyes cut to Charles standing silently beside us.

“Who was Renny?” Geoffrey asks.

To Renny.
So simple, and not.

Fletcher fixes his gaze on the frescoed ceiling: a woman floating in white, playing a violin among others floating around her, all surrounded by cherubs in red. I did tell him about the dedication. He listened and nodded the way he does when he doesn’t want to face a thing, the more quickly to have it done.

Geoffrey says, “She’s my sister, you know, and she’s gone and all she left are these photographs, and I don’t have any idea who Renny was.”

He extends a hand to Fletcher, who relinquishes the book to him. Geoffrey opens it to the dedication page as if he needs to show me what I’ve done.

I stare at the ink on the page in Geoffrey’s hand, at the graceful fingers holding the book, both familiar and not.

Charles’s hand goes to his glasses, adjusts them on his narrow face, and I fear he is going to cry. I imagine trying to tell him, just as I imagined trying to tell Fletcher in the days and months after the war. Liv’s baby would have been Charles’s daughter or son, not Fletcher’s; I’d found some awful relief in that.

For a moment, I imagine assuring Charles and Geoffrey both that the book is dedicated to Fletcher’s and my daughter. Had it been Fletcher’s idea or mine to name our daughter Renny? I don’t even remember anymore. What I remember is Mama appearing at my hospital bedside in England; the letter from Fletcher offering us a place at Trefoil Hall for my recuperation; Fletcher returning in the spring, after the evacuee girls had gone back to London and Elizabeth had gone off with her new love. What I remember is the long conversations Fletcher and I had in the summer and fall and winter after the peace, with Larkins and Serle and Mama caring for me at Trefoil Hall, and caring for Fletcher, too. Fletcher’s wounds not physical, but the wounds of what he saw in Berlin and Buchenwald added to the rest. What I remember is the void we tried to fill with a child neither of us could bear to name Olivia, our Renata who grew beyond the burdens of her birth to be her own person.

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.