As much as she wanted to, on the day she was due to leave for Italy, Jenny wasn't able to avoid Warren Moore. He met her in the lobby at six in the morning and she tried to deflect everything he might say or do with an apology.
"I'm sorry about your promotion," she said honestly. "If I can speak to somebody to let them know that, as much as it wasn't my fault, it wasn't your fault either, then I will."
As soon as the words left her mouth, she knew she had made a huge mistake. His face contorted, at first surprise, and then anger flared, covering up what might have been embarrassment, or indeed humiliation. Of course, he wouldn't want a woman to know of his failures, or for that same woman to then offer assistance in rectifying them.
"I don't need help from a model," he said slowly.
"I know that," she said quickly, wanting to leave. "I just..."
"Go to Italy, Miss Snow," he said suddenly, challengingly. "And just so you know, I didn't lose. I let you stay. It'll be more fun watching you leave in disgrace later, just when you think you've settled in."
"I don't intend to do anything disgraceful, Officer Moore," Jenny said, drawing herself up to modelish height, despite knowing that the best course of action would be to just ignore him, collect her bags and leave.
"I read over the War Department's screening notes. You won't be able to help yourself," Warren said with a smirk.
"Nothing in those notes was true," Jenny replied.
He laughed. "Well, that's a shame. Because I may have drunk a little too much last night and I may have let a few details about your fondness for the opposite sex and certain bedroom activities slip in front of the other correspondents."
And then, before she was able to let the full blaze of her fury unleash itself upon Warren Moore, his demeanor changed and he began to recite, blandly, a list of rules.
"Girl reporters must never put themselves closer to the front than the nurses in the field."
Jenny stared at him, bewildered by the swift shift of the conversation.
"Good work, Moore," another PRO, a sergeant major, said approvingly as he passed them.
"Thank you, sir," Warren replied obsequiously, falling into step with his superior and following him out of the lobby.
Jenny gathered her belongings and sat down to wait for Major Delaney, riled by everything Warren had said, but trying not to be. Thankfully Jack arrived and greeted her cordially as she seated herself in the jeep. He introduced her to the two men in the back, Private Casey and Private Owens, one blonde and blue-eyed with a bold, flirtatious smile, the other dark-eyed and shy. And both heartbreakingly baby-faced.
"They're replacements," Jack explained.
Jenny winced at everything the term implied. Jesus...they were just boys.
The two men gaped at her, then Casey, obviously the bolder of the two, gave her a suggestive hello and leaned forward to ask, "Say, aren't you..."
Jack squashed the flirtation with a dark look at his subordinate. The young private sat back with a disappointed twist of his lips.
As they pulled out onto the road, Jenny asked, "Shouldn't they be driving you? Don't majors get drivers?"
"As you found out in Italy, just because someone's driving a jeep, it doesn't mean they know where they're going. Those two haven't got a clue." Jack lowered his voice when he said it and she knew he didn't mean they were unsure of the route, but that they wouldn't be able to conceive of what awaited them in Italy.
She turned back to the two privates and gave them a smile; it was all she had to offer. "Yes, I'm Jennifer Snow."
"Private Casey, ma'am," said the blue-eyed one leaning forward to take her hand in his. His smile was flirtatious. And infectious.
Jenny smiled back. "And where are you from, Private Casey? Do I detect a hint of a southern accent?"
"Yes, ma'am," he said, his smile turning into a grin. "Bossier City, Louisiana."
Jenny looked at the darker, shyer of the pair noting how soulful and deep his eyes were. "And you, Private Owens. Where are you from?"
He cleared his throat nervously, his eyes barely meeting hers, his cheeks blushing furiously. "Um, Brooklyn, ma'am."
Owens looked like the kind of man she didn't realize still existed: innocent, a newly baptized babe who blushed furiously at her. Casey, on the other hand, took her smiles as if it were his due, leaning back in the seat, arm casually outflung, but then a car backfired nearby and she could have sworn she saw him jump and his face whiten. He immediately reached for a cigarette, no longer meeting her eye.
Jenny returned her attention to Jack and decided to risk ask him a few questions. "You were a captain. Now you're the major of a...what? Are you infantry?" She tried to see his division patch. "I'm still coming to terms with army structures and ranks and, at the risk of sounding stupid, I need some education."
"You don't sound stupid at all," Jack said. "The US Army is a world unto itself. I'm a paratrooper. Airborne division." He pointed to the AA on his sleeve. "In charge of a company."
A paratrooper. The Italian campaign was the first time paratroopers had ever been used, an elite squad of men trained within an inch of their lives to be dropped by plane behind enemy lines to wreak havoc and provide land support to an amphibious assault, such as that at Sicily.
Jenny was impressed but she only asked, "What were you doing in London? I don't imagine you came all the way here just for me."
"My company had been in combat for 79 days. Might not sound like a lot but in those conditions it's too much. We had leave and I didn't have the patience to foxtrot at the Orange Club in Naples, which is crawling with VD anyway..." It was his turn to wince. "Sorry."
"Don't be." Jenny shook her head. "When I was in Naples, I heard that one in ten GIs has VD. That you can buy a woman in exchange for a ration box."
"Women and syphilis are the cheapest and most plentiful things in Italy. There's hardly any food for the locals. The women have children they need to feed. The GIs have the only currency worth anything...rations. And some of them spend it any chance they get."
He spoke quietly, sadly, and Jenny knew from his tone that he wasn't one of the GIs trading his rations for women. "What a mess," she said.
"A mess I was happy to escape from for a week," he finished. "When I was in England, I heard that you needed a hand. Then I had meetings about..." He shrugged. "Forward planning."
"Invasion plans?" Jenny guessed. An invasion was being talked about more and more. Everyone knew it was coming but nobody knew when or how.
"Yes," Jack answered bluntly. "Now I need to say that I have some rules."
"Oh brother!" Jenny sighed. "Not you too!" For the last half hour she had started to think he was an ordinary person but now he sounded just like Warren Moore. "I've been told the rules so many times, I could recite them backward. I'm to stay out of combat zones. I'm not to flirt with any of your men or act in any way befitting my reputation of the model who has, for the past four years, lived with a man in a scandalously unmarried state and slept with at least half of America. Is that about it?"
Jack blinked slowly but didn't look shocked. "No," he answered evenly, his hands tight on the steering wheel of the jeep.
"What have I forgotten? Oh, of course, bat my eyelashes and wear skirts and silk stockings so you all have something to look at besides the mud?" she asked sarcastically.
She realized, once her outburst was over, that the two men in the back had gone completely silent in shock and embarrassment. So had Jack.
"Not even close," he said quietly at last. "Your past doesn't mean a damn thing out there in Purple Heart Valley, Lieutenant Snow. It's the present that's going to get you blown up. Which is what my rules are about, if you let me finish."
"Oh," Jenny said in a small voice.
"I didn't know you were a model or... anything else." The stoic paratrooper actually looked flustered.
Jenny couldn't help it. She began to laugh. To have finally found someone who didn't know or care who she was and having blurted it all out was not one of her finest moments.
"I'm so sorry," she gasped between bouts of laughter. "I think I might sit quietly and not say anything for the rest of the trip. I was mad with Warren Moore and I paid you the discourtesy of thinking you were just like him. Tell me your rules, Major, and I promise to listen." She tried to compose her face, but she knew the corners of her mouth were still twitching.
He laughed too and his eyes caught the light, glinting golden and leonine in the sunshine. "I know you're pissed off. I can't help that. My only rule is that the safety of my men comes first and if you jeopardize that, I'll boot you back to New York quicker than Warren Moore will. Fair enough?"
"Fair enough," Jenny agreed.
"And just so you know, I have the same rules for everyone, male or female," Jack added.
"Thank you," she replied. "And perhaps, maybe, you could just forget everything I said a moment ago?"
"I'm not very good at forgetting." He gave her a full on, toothy grin, his cheeks displaying dimples that bracketed his mouth with symmetrical charm. "But I promise I won't tell anyone."
Jenny bit her lip. "And I'll pray they're all as ignorant as you were."
Which of course they weren't. The minute she stepped out of the jeep and into the crowd of men waiting to board the troop ship to Italy, she felt the eyes on her. She heard whispers. One soldier elbowed his friend in the ribs and said loudly, "A model and not a virgin. This ship just got a lot more fun."
Fear. There it was again. She had thought bullets were the only things to be scared of in a war zone. But her reputation was proving to be the one obstacle she couldn't surmount. The fact that she had been gifted with naturally blonde hair, deep, soft brown eyes, well-honed cheekbones, full lips, skin that never spotted, and a figure that didn't look out of place in a bathing suit on the beach meant that she was still after all, only window dressing. Of the kind they'd obviously all like to handle. It was time, again, to fight.
"Excuse me," she said to Jack. "I need to borrow your jeep for a moment."
Before he could react, she climbed onto the hood, stood up and whistled for quiet.
"What the hell do you think you're doing?" Jack hissed up at her.
She ignored him and addressed the group of GIs in a loud, clear voice. "Yes, I'm Jennifer Snow, the model. Yes, I lived with a man that I wasn't married to. Like a very wise man recently said to me, none of that matters to the Germans. Over here, I'm a photojournalist. I intend to take pictures and write words that will be published in Vogue; words and pictures that your mothers, your sisters, your girlfriends and your wives back in America will read. Your stories."
She jumped down from the jeep and picked up her bags, pretending that she was simply on a stage at a fashion show, albeit the subject of more intense eyeballing than ever before.
She expected a scolding from Jack, a scolding which never came. He stared at her for a moment with grudging admiration, then looked around at all the stunned GIs. "I think you can probably all close your mouths and board ship now," he shouted. It was a command, and it was instantly obeyed.
Jenny obeyed too. And she was surprised to hear as she stepped across the gangplank, Private Owens say to her shyly. "Say, do you think they'd ever put my face in a magazine?"
Casey guffawed, but good naturedly; the idea of any of them adorning the pages of Vogue a ridiculous fantasy. In reply, Jenny unslung her camera from her shoulder, dropped her bags, focused and snapped a picture of Owens and Casey. Then a flurry of men descended on them and it became clear that something she had taken for granted, her face in a magazine, was a novelty, a moment of whimsy, an unbelievable possibility.
All the way to Italy, the men asked her to take their picture and she tried her hardest to capture the sense of them, incongruously young in their uniforms, setting off to war, but caring only if their mothers or girlfriends might see them and be proud of them if Jenny got their faces into the pages of Vogue.
***
At the port in Naples, Jenny disembarked and was approaching a truckdriver to try sweet talking her way into his truck going north when she felt a tap on her shoulder.
"Don't do that. I'll give you a ride," Jack said. "Anything to stick it to Warren Moore, who wants nothing more than for you to have to mope around Naples waiting days for a transport."
"Jeez Louise," Jenny said good naturedly with a fake pout. "A few months ago in Manhattan, I had a line of men offering to take me for a ride at the end of a party. Now it's a form of retaliation?" She sighed dramatically. "How the mighty have fallen!"
Jack laughed and inclined his head towards the jeep.
Jenny eyed the overflowing trucks lined up behind the command cars and officers' jeeps. "You really don't have to drive me around. I know you have better things to do."
"Climb in," Jack ordered in a voice that with brook no argument. "I have to stop at the field hospital anyway."
"Funny. You don't look sick," Jenny said teasingly.
Jack leaned his arms on the jeep as he spoke, his cropped dark hair almost hidden by his helmet, but the light of an Italian morning showing plainly in his warm, golden eyes that Jenny now saw were touched with a hint of hazel. She wondered how old he was and almost forgot herself and asked. He couldn't be much older than Warren Moore and was certainly handsome, but in a different way from the PRO. Jack was a man who knew himself, self-assured but without hubris, the hint of a smile at her words charismatic rather than leering.
Suddenly, she understood; he probably had at least one or two nurses chasing after him. "Ah," she said softly. "Someone special you'd like to see at the hospital?"
"Something like that," he replied enigmatically.
At the receiving tent of the hospital, a nurse smiled at Jack as they walked in. "She's been asking for you," she said with a smile. "I think she's in the convalescent tent with Leah."
"That's where I'm headed," Jenny said, eyeing Jack appraisingly as they threaded through a maze of tents and guy ropes. First lovely, golden-haired Leah, now another woman in the nurse's quarters; he really did seem to take Martha's philosophy to heart, that you needed love, or at least bodily comfort, in the midst of war.
After a few minutes they stopped at a tent from which Jenny could hear, incongruously, a child's laugh. She picked up the Rollei, feeling a prickle of alertness creep over her skin, and readied it.
"Natalia?" Jack called and Jenny heard an excited gasp, followed by the tent flap opening, and a little girl tore out and into Jack's arms.
Jenny had the camera ready and in the perfect position to capture the moment of their embrace, Jack's back to her, the girl's smiling, ecstatic face full to the camera. The little girl had twin blonde braids, fine, wispy curls framing her cherubic face from which shown a pair of the most crystalline blue eyes Jenny had ever seen, and a look of pure joy at being enfolded in the major's arms.
"You're back!" the little girl named Natalia cried.
The faces of Leah and the other nurse who had emerged from the tent reflected everything Jenny felt: that the ordinary moment of an embrace had been transformed by war into something precious. And she was so glad that she had come back to Italy. These were the stories she could tell, the pictures she would take; of the humanity behind the guns. The compassion beyond the bloodshed, and the fact that, as a counterbalance to evil, charity, mercy and love still existed and could therefore triumph.
She caught the eye of Leah who was standing there beaming down at the major and Natalia's embrace and the nurse gave her a small wink.
"I am Natalia," the little girl announced to Jenny. "What is that?" She slithered out of Jack's arms and pointed to Jenny's camera.
"Please to meet you, Natalia," Jenny said, crouching down to Natalia's level, speaking to her in fluent Italian, detecting the girl's accent. "It's my camera. Would you like to see it?"
Natalia clapped her hands. "You speak like Papa," she said, also in Italian, and Jenny wondered who the hell her papa was and why he had left her in such danger.
Jenny squatted closer to the ground, held out the camera and pointed to the viewing lens. "You look through here," she said, "and then this here," she pointed to the lens that would capture the image, " will copy a picture of what you see when you press the button. But the picture will stay inside the camera until I go back to London and have it printed out for you. I promise I'll bring it back next time I'm here. It'll probably take a few weeks."
"Everything takes a long time," Natalia said with a sigh of resignation well beyond her years.
Jenny looked up at Jack. What was the child doing in a field hospital? Was she his? She had said that her papa spoke Italian, and Jack was about as Italian as the Empire State Building. But the way Jack and the girl had greeted one another; it was as intimate as a father and child.
"Where's Natty?" another voice shouted and two soldiers appeared. "We got you some chocolate, Natty," one of them said, holding out a white packet emblazoned with the words 'US Army Field Ration D'.
"It's Natalia," the little girl said crossly. "But thank you." She stood up on tiptoes to kiss each soldier on the cheek, all the while never letting go of Jack's hand.
"Are you boys discharged?" Jack asked them and they nodded.
"Yes, sir. That's why we needed our kisses," one of them said, indicating Natalia.
"Thought we could get a ride back with you, sir," the other one added.
"Sure," Jack said. "Just give me five minutes."
"Thanks, little Natty," one of the soldiers said. The other added, "Bye, Natty!" before they both moved off in the direction of the jeep.
"It's Natalia," the little girl called after them. "I'm Italian!" Then she turned her attention back to Jenny. "Are you Jack's friend?"
"I think so," Jenny said.
"Then, you can be my friend, too. But Jack is my best friend," Natalia qualified.
Jack crouched down beside Natalia. "I have to go. I'll come back whenever I can. I promise."
The little girl's face crumpled. "I want you to stay." Then she lifted her chin and a stoic expression came over her young face. "But, I know what you're going to say. You have to go fight Jerry."
It was almost comical hearing the term come from the rosy, babyish lips of a child who couldn't be more than...four? Five? Jenny admittedly hadn't had that much experience with children so she couldn't tell.
Jack smiled a bittersweet smile and reached up to touch Natalia's cheek as he swallowed hard. "I'll come back," he promised in a soft voice.
"What about if I show you my camera some more?" Jenny said, with a smile.
Natalia nodded, her eyes tear-filled. Jack used the moment to unravel himself from the girl, who kissed his cheeks.
"Let me just walk Jack back to the jeep and then we'll look at the camera, okay?" Jenny said, before she hurried after Jack, scrambling over the mud and slime to keep up. "Who is she?" she asked him bluntly.
"You need a pair of jump boots," Jack said as he walked.
"Jump boots?"
He nodded at her boots, which she had thought, before encountering Italy, would keep her feet dry. "Paratrooper boots. Like these." He pointed at his boots and Jenny felt a serious pang of envy at the sturdy, thick, high leather boots that would indeed be perfect.
"The US Army gave me a pair of brown oxfords and I knew enough about roughing it to understand they'd be useless, so I got these." She pointed ruefully at her own inadequate boots, which had been the most serviceable she could find in Manhattan.
Jack studied her feet. "I'll get you a pair. They're in demand though. No sooner has an airborne GI died and someone from infantry is claiming his boots."
Jenny shuddered and winced. "I don't know if I could wear a dead man's boots," she said honestly.
Jack replied just as honestly. "If I died I'd rather someone who needed them had my boots than they were buried in this muck." He gestured at the slimy mud all around them. "Major Foster, the surgeon you met that night at the field hospital, has my brother Patrick's stethoscope because it's a damn good one. Too good to go to waste."
"Your brother was a doctor?" Jenny asked, wide-eyed.
Jack merely nodded. He spoke fast, in a manner suggesting that if he didn't say it all at once he wouldn't be able to. "Yes, he was. On vacation in Europe, he met a French girl, fell in love, married and moved to Paris. He worked with the French army as a surgeon in 1940, the same year that his wife was due to give birth. It was the worst damn time to have a baby."
Jenny nodded, remembering that the end of May was when the British Army had fled France, and that June was when Paris surrendered, when the Germans took France for themselves. It was worse than the worst damn time to have a baby.
"There was a mass exodus of people out of Paris in June, trying to keep ahead of the Germans. My sister-in-law was one of them," Jack continued, starting to walk again, slowly. "The roads were so jammed with cars that it took days to travel a few miles, there was no water and no food and the Krauts bombed the lines of refugees, not just French, but Jews, Italians, Russians..." Jack paused and shook his head. "So, everyone did what they could to protect their children. They gave them to convoys of French soldiers fleeing south, anyone with a vehicle. They thought they would all get to somewhere south of the Loire and it would be safe and they would be reunited."
"My God," Jenny said quietly, unable to think what it would be like to hand your child over to strangers because it seemed the better choice.
"Patrick was with a convoy of medics and a woman handed him two children through the window just after the Stukas had straffed a line of civilians. One was older, a boy; he'd been shot, and he died soon after. The other was a baby girl, about a year old."
"Natalia," Jenny whispered. "But why isn't she with your brother's wife?"
Jack didn't answer that question. Instead, a long stream of terrible words filled the air like mortar explosions as he told her that his brother had waited just across the border in Italy for a fortnight trying to find the baby's mother as she said that's where she was going. But there were too many lost children and no possible way to reunite them all. Patrick hadn't been able to give the baby to another family as nobody had enough milk for their own children. So, he had taken the child to a small village in Italy where his wife had gone to be with family.
"He thought he and his wife could care for the baby for a couple of weeks, then he'd go back to the border and try again once everything was settled down. But at his wife's family's home, he found..." Jack stopped.
They were back at the jeep, the men he had promised a ride to huddled into their coats and their seats. "Fucking rain," he grumbled softly as the relentless drizzle turned into a torrent that really couldn't make them any wetter than they already were. "Sorry."
"If you think that's the first time I've heard that word then you really have forgotten everything I told you in London," she said gently.
It made the corners of his mouth turn up a little and he leaned his back against the jeep, away from the waiting men and went on, his voice low. "His wife and their baby had died in childbirth. There were no doctors left in the village. His mother-in-law was ill from grief and his father-in-law refused to so much as look at Natalia because he thought she was a changeling who had taken his daughter's and granddaughter's place."
"Jesus Christ," Jenny swore.
Jack stopped speaking, his jaw tight. Jenny leaned back against the jeep too, next to him, but not looking at him so he could speak out into the rain, rather than to her. "The baby wouldn't settle with anyone but Patrick. And his father-in-law had made everyone suspicious of Natalia; you have no idea the kinds of beliefs people in the countryside have. The final straw was when Pat walked in on his father-in-law shaking her. He knew he had to leave or Natalia would be dead too. He got to London. As soon as the American troops rolled into Italy, he signed on as a medical officer. He brought Natalia with him."
Jenny risked a glance at him, remembering the horror of last month. The thickness of the blood beneath her shoes, the latrines walled with a teetering pile of sudden blankets, the proximity of the shells. It was incomprehensible. "So your brother was the man she calls Papa? She doesn't know about her real parents?"
"She doesn't," Jack answered.
Silence broken only by the torrential rain hung between them. With the cover of the downpour that was almost impossible to see through, Jenny couldn't be sure how Jack felt at that moment, but his stance suggested a remoteness that made her heart crack a little when she thought of the burden he carried. How old was he? In charge of how many men? Knowing that whatever he ordered them to do could kill them. And a child to protect too.
She understood now how he could shoot a man and not look as if he felt anything; he had so many people to care about and to keep alive that he couldn't afford to expend any visible emotion on an enemy. But that didn't mean he didn't feel it. She waited for what he would say next, sensing by the tension dripping off him more thickly than the rain that it wouldn't be good.
"A shell landed on the operating tent in August. Pat was killed."
Jenny instinctively reached out a hand to touch his arm. "So now she's yours?"
"Yes," he answered simply. "And nobody will dare to send her away. She's our lucky charm. Almost a deity." He drew in a breath. "The boys bring her chocolate. They believe that if she kisses them on the cheek before they go out to fight, they'll survive. The boys who don't believe it are always the ones who get shot. I can't explain it. But it's what happens. No one in the upper reaches of the army wants to send away something the men believe in. So they turn a blind eye. The nurses look after her for me. I owe them a whole goddamn lot."
Jenny couldn't believe she had assumed he had wanted to drive her to the hospital so he could flirt with one of the nurses. He clearly had no time and no energy to be flirting with anyone. She patted his arm and offered him her most mischievous smile, trying to break the tension for him, wanting him to leave to face the enemy with lightness rather than sadness.
"Well, Major Delaney, I'm going to go and show Natalia my camera. And you'd better watch yourself. You might return to find out that I'm her new best friend!"