The Race for Paris Read online

  As the high turrets flanking the arched central entry to Trefoil came into view, the vaulting windows and stone gargoyles, Charles said to Liv, “Didn’t I tell you it was a castle? Tell her the story about your grandfather, Fletch.”

  “My great-great-great-great-granduncle,” Fletcher said.

  Charles waved off the correction with a flip of his hand and a dismissive “Uncle, grandfather. He won the place in a card game.”

  “A game of vingt-et-un did have a bit to do with it,” Fletcher conceded. “The ace of clubs my distant uncle flipped up didn’t win him the property, but it did gain him the fortune to build it. Yet it makes rather a better story to imagine the house itself at stake, doesn’t it?”

  “The house is shaped like an ace of clubs,” Charles explained to Liv. “A third turret overlooking the sea in the back matches these front two.”

  “The neighbors think it in abominable taste,” Fletcher said. “Which indeed it is.”

  Inside Trefoil Hall, a white-haired butler met them in a vaulted-ceilinged receiving hall frescoed with a crowd looking down from a balcony and romanticized heads of horses and swirls that weren’t really anything at all, a painting that somehow made the cavernous space seem less so. “Larkins,” Fletcher said, greeting the old man with genuine enthusiasm as the improbable sound of giggles spilled from above. Up a wide sweep of steps, the stairway paused at a landing before splitting into two narrower stairways, right and left, down which a dozen little girls—seven- and eight- and nine-year-old schoolgirls—came tumbling, peering through the banister.

  Fletcher bounded up the stairs and scooped two of the girls into his arms, laughing and saying, “My sweet cherubs!” in a tone that suggested he knew how ridiculous he was.

  Liv started up the stairs after him, but Charles remained with his feet planted in the entry hall, his hand reaching to the vulnerable balding spot Liv could see from the higher elevation of the stairs.

  “Now listen,” Fletcher said to the girls, “you must give a grand hello to Mr. Charles Harper. He runs a whole newspaper in New York.”

  “That’s in the United States,” one of the girls said. “It’s the biggest city in the world.”

  All the girls peered down at Charles, who peered back at them like a child who wants to play ball but is awkward with bat and glove. Liv longed to coach him, to say, It’s just like with grown-ups, Charles, you touch them on the arm and say something charming.

  Fletcher said, “I suppose that makes him rather an important chap, doesn’t it? And he has the extraordinary fortune to have married quite well, as you can see. This is his wife, Olivia James Harper. She’s a talented photojournalist, can you believe that?”

  Another girl, one with the same wispy, off-blond hair most of them shared, tilted her head up at Liv. “But she’s a girl!”

  Fletcher peered exaggeratedly at Liv. “Emily, by golly, you’re right. That she is.”

  They all giggled.

  “Well, you’ll have to take my word for it. She may be a girl, but she’s on her way to Paris to photograph the liberation. I expect she plans to be the first to take pictures there. I imagine she intends to march in before the troops will have done!”

  Charles, below, crossed his arms, creasing his jacket. “It isn’t a race, Fletcher.”

  “To Paris? Don’t be a berk, Charles.” Fletcher bent down on one knee so that he was at the girls’ level and said to them, “Of course it’s a race. One every journalist and photographer in Europe is eager to win, all in good fun. And do you know on whom I would place my wager, girls?” He nodded at Liv. “I’d like to point out, too, that I’m a pretty fair gambler.”

  “’Cept Cecily always wins at dice,” the girl he’d called Emily said.

  “Well, yes, but then Cecily is awfully lucky.”

  Charles frowned. “You’ve taught them to shoot craps?”

  Fletcher looked down at him, a mock scolding look. “Please, Charles. Dice.” Again, he addressed the girls conspiratorially. “Liv is going to be the first into Paris all right, and you can bet she’ll be famous then.”

  The girls crowded around Liv, everyone speaking at once: “You want to see my shrapnel collection? I got some of them when they were still warm.” “I got gum wrappers, thirty-six of them.” “I have cigarette packages. Pippa has a hundred.” “A hundred and eight.”

  Liv stooped to their level and said hello to a sad-eyed, curly-haired brunette in white cotton pajamas who hadn’t said a word in all the chaos. “What’s your name?” she asked.

  “Ella doesn’t speak,” Emily said. “She used to talk, but then her mum stopped coming and now she doesn’t say nothing.”

  Liv leaned back against the banister, trying not to look startled. “Doesn’t . . .” She took the girl’s hand, which was birdlike, fragile, wanting to scoop her up and take her to a safer world, one where daughters married in their mother’s white silk dresses and fathers, rather than twin brothers, gave them away.

  Dinner at Trefoil Hall that evening was served in a vast dining hall flanked at each end by cavernous fireplaces, their mantels of gray-white stone carved with lions and leaves and frippery, and with crests carved of onyx and some other stone Liv didn’t recognize, something a deep, rich red. It had been all she could do to get out of the bath she’d had before dinner, but now she and Charles and Fletcher sat alone at one end of a table meant to seat thirty, Larkins serving crisply roasted duck with rosemary new potatoes and carrots and peas Serle had prepared from the estate’s victory garden. The wine was a wonderful Bordeaux that had been aging in the cellar since long before the start of the war, Fletcher assured them, but still Liv felt the guilt of drinking it, the sense that it was somehow inappropriate to enjoy this wine in the relative safety of England when Hitler might be drinking the same wine while his soldiers trampled the vineyard where it was made.

  Fletcher suggested someone ought to do a story about what girls like those living at Trefoil were enduring. They saw their mothers only on Sundays, when special coaches brought them out. Liv felt the tug of that, the sympathy for these evacuee girls pulling against her need to get to the front.

  “That girl Ella,” she said to Fletcher. “Her mother . . . ?”

  “The other mums are kind to her,” he said. “She has an aunt who comes when she can as well, and her sister, until a few weeks ago, but now her sister is in France with a nursing unit. Her mother was killed in the Bethnal Green tube shelter last year. Someone stumbled as they entered the shelter, and the crowd pushed on, and in the end more than a hundred people were trampled to death, I’m afraid.”

  “One hundred and seventy-three,” Charles said.

  “But that’s impossible,” Liv said. “We’d have heard about something like that.”

  “It was kept from the newspapers,” Fletcher said. “The location. The magnitude of the disaster.”

  Charles nodded. “March eighth.”

  Liv stared for a surprised moment at the carve of lines around her husband’s eyes, at the grooves between his nose and mouth. He knew the exact date, the exact number of the dead. He knew what was printed, and he knew what was too awful to print.

  “And Ella’s father?” she asked.

  Fletcher said, “Somewhere in France.”

  Liv looked down at her meal, no appetite left as she listened to Charles and Fletcher recount the time they’d spent in Poland the way men who never shared much with anyone liked to retread their common ground. Charles said to Liv, “I’m not sure Fletcher and I would have stayed if Julien Bryan hadn’t showed up with his Leica in one hand and his Bell & Howell movie camera in the other just as everyone else was leaving. But Fletcher here couldn’t bear to let an American take the show away from him.”

  Fletcher took a studied sip of his Bordeaux and said he was glad to see the American censorship rules loosening. “So now you show your dead but you airbrush the poor sods’ faces so their mums won’t recognize them?”

  From the first full-page, full-b
leed shot that had run in the American papers—George Strock’s three dead Americans on the sand at Buna Beach—there were no faces on the American dead. They were shown facedown, like two of the three in Strock’s shot, or with faces hidden or turned away from the camera or cropped out or blackened in or obscured by shadows. Liv hadn’t thought about it in the negative; she’d thought, My God, how can these photos be so moving? They don’t even show the faces.

  Fletcher said, “Even the dead you half show are the few dead, casualties from an otherwise successful outing in the park.”

  Charles said, “But, Fletcher, imagine if your own mother—”

  “My mum would have you print the faces,” Fletcher said.

  Charles ran a hand through his hair, through the gray creeping in at the temples, the tidy, almost military cut.

  “March third,” Fletcher said. “Bethnal Green—that was March third.”

  “Yes, wasn’t that what I said?” Charles answered.

  Fletcher fingered the stem of his wineglass.

  “Showing women the faces of their dead sons and brothers and husbands would no more help win this war than would sending those women directly to France,” Charles continued. He looked to Liv, his eyes behind the glasses white against the deep tan of his long, intelligent face. “Honestly, Olivia, I can’t imagine why you should be the one made to go to Normandy just to photograph soldiers with bandages on their heads.”

  Liv lifted a plate of butter—real butter—feeling the silver at her fingertips as cool and soothing as a shutter release. “I’m not being made to go, Charles,” she said quietly, trying to understand this new resistance in him.

  Fletcher said, “You’d be in Normandy yourself, Charles, if you hadn’t let yourself get strapped to an editor’s desk. You’d be—”

  The dull realization of something passed in his expression. He reached for the decanter of wine, refilled his glass and Charles’s. Liv’s was still full, but he tipped the heavy decanter over the more fragile crystal of her glass, emptying into it the last little drop.

  Liv looked from Fletcher to Charles to the rich bloodred of the wine, the deep brown of the duck, the tender orange and green of the tiny carrots and perfectly round peas. She reached for her wine, the stem cool in her fingertips. She inhaled the wine’s musty cranberry and took a single, hesitant sip.

  Fletcher speared a bite of duck. “You would have gone back if you could have done, Charles,” he said. “If your father hadn’t taken ill. If you weren’t needed in New York.”

  Charles cut a substantial bite of meat but let it rest there on his plate. “Yes, of course I would,” he said, the slight squint of his eyes catching Liv off guard, reminding her of his expression as he’d asked her to marry him, as if for the briefest moment he’d imagined she might say no. She looked away to the fireplace, the smoke-darkened stone, but not before she heard the truth in Charles’s voice: Charles would never return to war.

  “Fletcher could be in France, too, but he’s not either,” Liv said, feeling even as she spoke that she was betraying Fletcher somehow, embarrassed by her need to betray him for the sake of Charles’s pride, and perhaps her own.

  In bed that night at Trefoil, when Charles traced a finger over Liv’s breast, she pressed her tongue lightly to her bottom teeth, the tension in her shoulders ebbing with the slight motion, sinking into the small of her back, her hips. His hand moved down to linger at her thigh before brushing upward, over her hip bone, her belly. “Shall we try for a Charles Jr.?” he said as he pulled the tie of her nightgown, releasing the fabric to expose her bare skin, releasing the longing. It wasn’t a fallback position, he’d said months before; having a baby wouldn’t make up for her being stuck taking photos of women knitting caps for the soldiers rather than photos of the soldiers wearing the caps in Africa or Italy or France. But now he said, “Come home with me, Liv, and we’ll have one of each. A Renny and a Charles.”

  She touched the curl of hair on his chest, dark still, but with gray sprinkled here and there—editor in chief gray, and who wouldn’t take that position, especially with his father too ill to do the job himself? He smiled down at her the way he was always smiling—at women having tea in fancy hotels, at sources he thought could give him a scoop, at the young New Hampshire gal he’d wanted to charm into working for him two years before, a young photographer who hadn’t even begun to think of herself as such, who hadn’t needed to be charmed.

  The next morning, when they awoke nestled together under the smooth, clean sheets, Charles reached for his glasses and put them on. He leaned back against the pillows, put his arms around her, and said, “Come home, Liv. It’s time to come home.”

  She curled into the warmth of him. “If we weren’t married, Charles,” she said gently, “if I were still working for you, you’d make me go to France.”

  He didn’t respond for such a long moment that she turned her face up to him. Before she could recover from the shock of it, the realization that he was crying, he said, “You’ll get yourself killed, for God’s sake.”

  She entwined her fingers in his sturdier hand and stared at the window, the blackout shade down but beyond it the Channel and the ship that would take her to France, if only she kept her nerve.

  “I’d lose my AP credential, Charles; I’d never work again,” she said in the gentle voice, willing away the ache in her chest, thinking she wouldn’t curl up with Charles every night while she was in France, but he would have the entire pool of AP photos to choose from and he would choose hers to run in the Daily Press, and that would be enough.

  Fletcher, with one hand on the steering wheel, extended a pack of cigarettes to me. I took one and ducked down toward my typewriter to light it with my Zippo. Liv declined the pack. Fletcher took one between his lips and returned the cigarettes to the netting liner of his helmet, where he’d learned to keep them after too many attempts to light soggy fags with soggy matches. Around us, new roads were being bulldozed through banks of rocky field scrap and thick, impenetrable hedges. Cacophonous collections of road signs directed in French, German, and English: code names like “Madonna Charlie” and “Vermont Red” for the invasion beaches, towns like Luc-sur-Mer, and arrows nailed over signs reading “Umgehung” (Bypass, Fletcher told us), the kilometer markings all painted over with miles. White tape along the roadsides indicated where mines hadn’t yet been cleared beyond the banks, and boards painted with skulls and crossbones barred the way into fields that were unlikely riots of daisies, poppies, gorse, and Queen Anne’s lace. Military police directed traffic at the busiest of corners, aided by children wearing pinafores and the MPs’ military caps. The children’s mothers waved from the side of the road at the endless caravans, trucks full of soldiers and supplies headed away from the Channel, and the wounded returning. The MPs weren’t looking for us, at least not yet.

  I turned to my typewriter and banged out a sentence: The war is thick in the long shadows, not just in the shattered buildings and the broken road, but in the French faces as well.

  “What are you two doing at the front?” Fletcher asked, still with the cigarette between his lips. “Neither of you has to be here, and besides, Liv, I heard you—”

  He frowned abruptly and lit his cigarette, holding the steering wheel steady with his knee while he cupped the fag.

  “I’m what?” Liv asked.

  He cleared his throat. “You’re expecting—”

  The jeep clipped the edge of the road, throwing Liv and me against its side as Fletcher gripped the wheel, straightening back onto the road and cursing himself.

  “I’m expecting what?” Liv asked as I righted my typewriter and smoothed the creased paper.

  Fletcher glanced at her. “I thought you were expecting.”

  Liv said, “Expecting what, Charles?”

  “Fletcher,” I said.

  “What?” Fletcher said.

  “She just called you Charles,” I said. “Liv, you called Fletcher Charles.”

  “Fletcher,�
�� she said irritably. “What are you taking about, Fletcher? Expecting what?”

  Beyond the cracked glass of the jeep’s window, land that might once have been a vineyard was a stretch of blackened earth.

  Fletcher flicked the cigarette, though there was no ash buildup to dispose of. “Expecting,” he said. “With child.”

  Liv and I both laughed.

  “Having a baby?” Liv said. “Who started that rumor?”

  “I don’t . . .” Fletcher tugged at his ear with the hand that held his cigarette as I remembered Mama’s words the night of Tommy’s engagement party: A rumor makes a reputation, whether it ought to or not.

  Fletcher said, “I don’t remember where I heard it.”

  “Can you honestly imagine, Fletcher, that I’d be here—going AWOL!—if I were carrying a child? Can you imagine Charles would allow it?”

  The car engine hummed lower as Fletcher disengaged the clutch and threw the gearshift forward.

  “The only thing I’m expecting at the moment,” Liv said, “is to arrive in Paris before anyone else does.”

  “No one is going to Paris,” Fletcher said. “Eisenhower intends to circumvent the city.”

  Liv leveled a look at him. “And you believe that?” Then to me, “No wonder he’s a photojournalist.”

  “I’m not. I’m a military photographer,” Fletcher said.

  Liv said to me, “Of course he is. He’s far too gullible even to be a photojournalist.”

  “No one is going to Paris,” Fletcher repeated.

  But Paris was what we’d broken the rules for. We’d gone AWOL so we’d have a chance to document the Tricolor raised high over the city, Parisians celebrating in the streets as Allied troops marched across the Seine, down the Champs-Élysées, through the Arc de Triomphe.