The Undaunted

The Paris Correspondent

Jenny walked into her hotel suite on the Rue Scribe, just a few meters from the Opera, a bellboy following behind with her luggage. She paused just inside the doorway as the bellboy squeezed around her then looked expectantly over his shoulder at her. She cast an eye around the apartment with its wide-open floor plan, scuffed parquet floors, and fanciful old crown molding which featured flowers and fruits and cherubs crumbling with age but smiling benignly down at her and anyone else who entered.

Across the room, beyond the shabby matching peach and gold davenport and armchairs were a pair of narrow French doors that stood open, the breeze from the Seine blowing the sheer white curtains gracefully inward. Outside on that rusted iron terrace was a delicately rusted wrought iron table with matching chairs, reminiscent of the ice cream stools in her old apartment in New York. Jenny breathed, closing her eyes briefly, listening out for a very special sound she had been looking forward to hearing ever since she had boarded her flight back from New York to Paris.

She suddenly seemed to remember the young man who had entered with her.

"Just put them there," she said to him in French, indicating the narrow hallway which led to her bedroom. She tipped him generously before he left.

Only after she had closed the door behind him, did Jenny hear the sound for which she had been waiting. A deliriously happy cooing sound.

Jenny spun around, a wide, dazzling smile on her face hurried towards the sound which had emanated from a small baby, still so small and so new, carried in the arms of her nurse. The nurse was smiling broadly as she gave the child up to her mother and stood back, hands folded in front of her, watching the sweet maternal reunion. For Jenny, it was as if the entire world had vanished, shrinking to the size of a bubble just large enough to contain her and her baby daughter.

From the moment the baby had been placed in Jenny's arms, moments after her birth, and Jenny had looked into the small, helpless face, she fell in love. In those moments after the long, grueling labor, Martha Gellhorn squeezing her hand and propping her up to push her daughter out into the world, it had not mattered who had fathered Hope. She was Jenny's child and her sole source of joy after the heartbreak of losing Jack. She had held the tiny, whimpering newborn to her, kissing the soft down on her head, and thanking God for her safe delivery in the tiny maternity ward of a French hospital, barely back to functioning after the war.

Jenny pressed her forehead against the sweet-smelling infant's soft, downy hair, pressing a euphoric kiss into it. "Ah, Hope," she sighed, her voice a little muffled as she spoke for her lips were still pressed against her baby's head. "How I missed you, my sweet angel."

She looked down into the baby's face, smiling broadly. She had named her Hope, in honor of the Allied victory in Europe and the Pacific. But there had been another, more personal reason for the name. This child embodied Jenny's own personal victory over the evil she had experienced towards the end of the war. An unspeakable evil that no longer bore thinking about. Never one to waste time, Jenny had leapt back into her work as soon as her body recovered and spent a great deal of time away from the apartment and from Hope. More than she wanted to. So, these moments with her baby daughter were even more precious and treasured to her.

But Jenny knew that as Hope grew up, she'd need more stability than an old, war-torn apartment and her mother gone most of the time. She had to cement her career and move to a permanent residence, preferably out of the city, so that even when she was gone on her many assignments, Hope would still have some semblance of normality.

As she continued to tenderly nuzzle the baby's soft hair and cheek, Jenny looked at the baby's nurse. "Were there any calls or important messages left for me while I was gone, Nicole?"