The Undaunted

"Make the Images Stop, Jack..."

As dawn touched the sky the morning after Casey killed himself, Jenny took a jeep, stopped at the press camp to write her story and parcel up her film, and then Martha drove her to Paris. On the way, her mind played ceaselessly over the peacocks, the guard, the bodies in the boxcar, the women's eyes, and Casey, flirtatious and too pretty for his own good, his bloodied head in her lap when Jack and a group of others heard her god-awful screams and found her.

She dimly remembered Jack ordering someone to lift her up and take her away, half carrying her as they did. Then a glimpse of Jack sitting there where she had sat, cradling Casey like a brother and how she had been unable to go to him and comfort him. More and more dim memories crowded her aching skull: Leah's sympathetic and tear-filled blue eyes as she gently and competently bathed Casey's blood from Jenny's hands, her face, her hair. Her hair. How had it gotten in her hair? Martha sitting on the edge of her cot, a comforting hand on her back, smoking a cigarette, offering one to Jenny which Jenny refused mutely. She stared at the tent walls all night long and thought of those people in the camp, the ones who survived and the ones who didn't and suave, pretty Casey with his empty blue eyes. And Jack. Always Jack...

Leah read to her in a soft murmured voice, "What time I am afraid, I shall trust in Thee..."

What time I am afraid, I shall trust in Thee. The words, one of many prayers from the US Army prayer book, words that were supposed to provide comfort to a man like Casey when he most needed it, echoed mercilessly in her head. Jenny shut her eyes, but the tears pressed through her lids. She let the empty glass of whiskey fall to the dirt floor with a muffled thump and rolled over in bed, eyes sinking closed in a drunken stupor. It was the only way to get to sleep that terrible night.

Three days and nights back in the Hotel Scribe was enough to convince her she couldn't go on that way. Martha suggested a party and in her voice Jenny heard the same fatigue, the same enervation, the same fracturing sound of a person pushed so close to their breaking point that anything, even a mistimed smile, might cause them to snap.

So, a party they would have the following night. She made sure the word was spread out to the hotels used by the GIs... everyone who'd been at the camp had been given several days leave and most had come to Paris.

When it was time to dress, Jenny dismissed her pinks and the khaki skirts. She was going to wear a goddamn normal dress; not Chanel, not Schiaparelli; she refused to wear anyone who'd run from the war. She'd wear the dress she'd fashioned from a white silk parachute, the one she had worn for their impromptu New Year's Eve party that now seemed ages ago.

She had lost some weight since then, the skirt dropping like a bridal veil into a long train that would most likely be crushed and torn by the boots of the GIs who came to the party. Jenny didn't care. She would wear it anyway and she would smile and behind the patriotic red lipstick and the dark kohl and mascara she would hide the fact that every night when she lay down, she had to first drink enough whiskey so that the images before her eyes blurred into indistinction.

Hemingway came, along with all the correspondents in Paris. He took up a place on the balcony among the jerry cans of fuel and waited with a bottle of whiskey for everyone to pay homage to him, which many did. Martha rolled her eyes at the sight of her famous husband and danced slowly and seductively with Major Gavin, the divisional commander who had caught more than just her eye. Pablo Picasso and Simone de Beauvoir strolled in; Jenny's past as a Vogue model and the mistress of Andre Robard was the currency that paid for their appearance.

Then came the GIs, not just from Jack's battalion but others she and Martha had met over the past eighteen months. The tiny room was thick with bodies and she could see that was all part of the appeal, the press of flesh to flesh, a dance and a kiss and who knew where it might lead? Because they all had a reason to seek oblivion, to erase, for just one night, the awful knowledge that the Allied victories didn't erase the abominable things that had already been done.