Private Owens was waiting for Jenny when she stepped off the ship, his face obviously hastily scrubbed clean for the assignment, faint dirt streaks showing where his fingers had swiped over his brow and chin.
"Lieutenant Snow," he stuttered with a blush.
"To whom do I owe the pleasure of being provided with an escort?" Jenny asked with a smile.
"Leah told Major Delaney you were coming again and he said since he had to provide escorts for all the male correspondents who come over he didn't see why you should have to hitch through Italy. Last month, I even had to carry one fellow's camera lenses around for a week."
Jenny snorted. How could the Army honestly think a woman who didn't get ground transport or ask for assistance was more trouble than a man? A curious rustle of noise made her realize there was quite a line of GIs assembled at port, and that the London PRO who had congratulated Officer Moore all those weeks ago was smiling at her in a way that was certainly not friendly.
"Well, well look what I have," he said, stepping forward to show her a crumpled picture he had taken from his pocket. It was of Jenny, shot for Harper's Bazaar in 1940 in the early days of her modeling career. In it, she was sitting on the floor reading a book, back to the camera, naked except for her knickers, but all you could see of her in the photograph was her bare back and the very top of her hipbones. She had been waiting for her next outfit when the photographer decided Jenny didn't need an outfit; the shoot was meant to show off the diamond clip in Jenny's hair, rather than a dress. For the first time, Jenny wondered how many people actually noticed the hair clip.
"I've got one too," another man joined in the fun, pulling a different picture out of his pocket, this time of Jenny in a two-piece bathing suit.
"One of the public relations guys in London was real helpful in finding these for us," the PRO said. "Now, here you are in the flesh."
It was not lost on Jenny how he lingered over the word flesh, and she just stopped herself from shuddering. Warren Moore, Jenny knew, was the one who had made sure the men had so many pictures of her. But that, apparently, wasn't the worst of it.
"Here. I have a telegram for you," the PRO said handing her a piece of paper.
Jenny's face fell as she read it. Her orders had been countermanded. She was to return immediately to London. It'll be more fun to watch you leave in disgrace later, just when you think you've settled in, Warren had said to her. And she wondered if Warren had let her go, had wanted to make sure that, before he ordered her to come back and sit in a bar and watch the war from a distance, she would see that every man in the US Army had a picture of Jenny to paw over.
"When's the next ship back?" she asked, as if she didn't care about any of it.
"Tomorrow. Take her to one of the hotels for the night," the PRO said to Owens.
At that, Owens hitched Jenny's bag onto his shoulder and walked away to the jeep. Jenny followed. What else could she do? Stand at the port and watch the GIs compare pictures of her? She hadn't won when her story and her photos of Natalia were published. Warren Moore had just wanted her to think she had because he knew that would make the loss hurt all the more.
Owens pulled the jeep out onto the road. "My orders from my CO are to take you to the hospital at Cassino," he said shyly. "I could bring you back early enough tomorrow to catch the ship."
Jenny leaned over and kissed his cheek, which were, as always, suffused with the endearing blush that proclaimed his innocence.
"Thank you," she said sincerely. And thank you, Jack, she silently thanked the CO.
***
When Jenny woke the next morning, it was to find Natalia curled up in bed beside her, staring at her, obviously willing her to wake.
"You came back too!" Natalia cried and Jenny realized it was what she said every time she saw Jack, and now Jenny. As if the little girl could never quite believe that anyone would return, as if being passed by her mother to a convoy of medics, never to meet again, was trapped in her psyche like a leaf fossil in rock, barely visible to anyone who didn't know what they were looking for.
Jenny hugged Natalia tightly. "Yes, I did."
They climbed out of bed, even though it was before sun-up, and the mundane tasks of the morning were transformed, by both the marvelous lack of rain and Natalia's assistance into something more delightful than collecting water in her helmet to wash her face and eating a breakfast K-ration of egg yolk mixed with Spam.
They were walking through the tents to visit Leah when Jenny heard a familiar voice say, "I thought I'd better take you somewhere this morning before you leave so that you have your own set of pictures to show Warren Moore."
She spun around just in time to see Natalia leap into Jack's arms.
"I will come too," Natalia announced but Jenny knew that wasn't going to happen. The hospital was dangerous enough, let alone going anywhere else.
"Oh, but I have a job for you," Jenny said quickly. "Come with me."
She retrieved a stack of Vogue magazines from her tent. "There are pictures of you in here," Jenny said to Natalia, "and pictures of Leah and some of the soldiers. And one of Jack," she added. "Can you show the magazines to Leah and the men in the convalescent tent?"
Natalia hopped up and down with excitement. "Yes!" she cried.
Jenny opened up the magazines and showed Natalia the photograph of the little girl in Jack's arms. Natalia's smile was infinite now, carved onto her face in black and white by Jenny's camera, this one moment of immense love unable to ever be destroyed. Jack's face in profile was unguarded and Jenny had had to close the covers the first time she had seen it because it made her realize that he was vulnerable; that, without him, Natalia had nobody. Jenny wanted to shout at him, Don't you damn well die!
She wondered now if he'd be able to look at himself. She understood all too well, because it had been done to her, that a photograph could trap a person in an incarnation unknown to them, but seeing such an image could feel like nakedness, bringing with it the revelation that the photographer had exposed a part of them that would ordinarily be hidden from the world. Jenny hadn't comprehended just what she had caught, and it was only seeing the print that she realized it was a one-in-a-million shot, that she might never photograph anything quite as poignant again.
Jack's head jerked back as Natalia held the magazine aloft and awareness hit him. Then the nurses crowded around, and Jenny said, "Let's go," wanting to get him away from seeing what Jenny had seen: evidence of the fracture in his armor.
Jenny knew now that everything Andre had told her about photography, her entire experience of it as both her parents' child photographer and as a model before the lens was wrong. The chance moment was what mattered out here, that and the premonition before the moment happened so that one was ready. Not the careful positioning of a person or an object or a light source, not the fully imagined outcome of what would be caught after aligning the camera and pressing the button. Her job was to extemporize, not to plan, and thus expose the reality that had been obscured by the reduction of everything around them into three letters in one simple word: War.
And that's what she'd do once again on this outing with Jack. "Where we going?" she asked as they neared the jeep.
"It's Easter," Jack said as if that explained everything.
Jenny thought for a moment and realized he was right, but in this place divorced from real time, each day blended into the next; nameless. "And we're going to church?" she quipped.
"Sort of," he said, and Jenny just about burst with curiosity.
Then he added, "I'll be in England soon. My division's been recalled. I'm taking Natalia back with me, putting her in a boarding school there."
Which meant only one thing. It was coming. The mammoth attack on Europe. An attack Jenny would never be allowed to witness or report on. She wanted to thump her hand on the jeep from the injustice of it. Instead, she said quietly, "I'll visit her whenever I can. I mean, I'll have plenty of time if Warren Moore has his way."
Jack stopped in front of the jeep. "You're a great writer, Jenny. And a damn good photographer. Keep fighting them."
Jenny found herself momentarily speechless and having received admiration of the real kind, not of her face or her cleavage or her legs. But praise that actually meant something. "Thanks," she said at last, too choked up to say anything more before she climbed into the jeep.
Jack drove fast, but expertly, as if they had somewhere they needed to be, and soon he had stopped and was jumping out. "Now we have to walk the rest of the way."
They soon joined a column of soldiers winding up the escarpment before them, the dawn's sun just beginning to change the landscape orange and pink, mist wafting around, then disappearing below them as they climbed higher so that they seemed to have stepped over the clouds and into the sky. Hardly anyone spoke, and all Jenny could hear were boots shuffling through sand, guns rattling on shoulders, and the one warning Jack had given her: "Don't step off the path. There are mines everywhere."
The shutter on the Rolleiflex clicked intermittently as they hiked and Jenny was grateful that nobody had really noticed her yet; her helmet hid her face, her uniform was the same as the men's, and she was tall enough that she didn't look too out of place. The only thing that marked her as different was the camera she carried instead of a gun.
They reached a place where the slope leveled out onto a ledge, with a large flat rock in the center. The men veered off and found positions, seating themselves on the ground or leaning against the face of the mountain. Jenny sat near the edge, the daredevil child still hidden inside her making her hang her legs and boots over the side, swinging freely. Jack did the same and they both stared out at the massive Garigliano Valley spread before them. A faint ribbon of distant sea glimmered blue on one side; the snow-capped mountains loomed up on the other.
Most of the ground in the valley was ruined but, up here, olive trees clung stubbornly to the hillside and anemones bloomed pink and purple in the cracks of the ground. Jenny drank in it like whiskey, trying to ignore the fire that burned below them, blazing high even though she couldn't believe there was anything down there left to burn.
She lined up the Rolleiflex and shot the once fertile valley, which now grew nothing but guns, then a group of men sprawled on the ground, then a mule with, inexplicably, a small camp organ on its back, then another man with a large book that he placed on the flat rock. Jenny realized he was wearing a chaplain's uniform but before she could ask Jack about it, a shell whizzed over the group, dropping harmlessly into the valley below them, more fire marking its detonation.
"How close exactly are the Germans?" she asked Jack.
"About four hundred yards," he replied nonchalantly.
"That sounds awfully close," she said nervously.
"They won't hit us. It's Easter; a temporary ceasefire. Besides, we're not in range. They have to move and they're not going to come out of their dugouts with so many of us sitting here."
Before Jenny could decide if Jack was right, the chaplain began to speak. Somehow, they had a microphone and loudspeakers rigged up and the chaplain's welcome, to both Catholics and Protestants of the US and German armies, and his wish to them all for a joyous Easter, was proclaimed in both German and English, the sound ringing out to where Jenny imagined the German dugouts must be, and carrying far out over the valley below them.
"After the sabbath, and toward the dawn on the first day of the week, Mary of Magdalene and the other Mary went to see the sepulcher," the chaplain read in German. Then he reread the gospel in English.
Throughout, nobody spoke. Instead they sat listening to the story of a miracle, all too aware that what everyone wanted, no matter their nationality, was a miracle of the kind that hadn't been seen since the Gospel of Saint Matthew was written.
"He is not here. He is risen..."
When the chaplain finished, somebody sat down at the organ and began to play. To Jenny's astonishment, Leah stood up from a small group of nurses and began to sing "I Know That My Redeemer Liveth" from Handel's Messiah and the beauty of her lone voice, the bell-like soprano ringing out over a desecrated Italian valley, was too much for Jenny.
She squeezed her hands together and gritted her teeth but her throat burned and the tears were too many for her eyes to hold and they spilled over, running like the Italian winter rain down her cheeks. She closed her eyes and swallowed, trying not to sob aloud, trying to hold herself together, to stop her body from shaking.
Something brushed her hand and Jenny opened her eyes to find that Jack had taken gentle hold of it, but his jaw was clenched tight too. They sat like that for the entire song, hands pressed tightly and painfully together, but it was the only way to listen to the hymn and not fall to pieces like the shell that had burnt out to nothing far below them.
Keep fighting them, he had told her.
And she would, she vowed, as the hymn crescendoed. Warren might well stink her up when she got back to London or confine her to the Savoy. But damn the consequences; she'd press the rules to the limits to find a way to get out of the Savoy and back to Europe to photograph the moments like this, a tiny piece of heaven amidst the firestorm of invasion.
The silence after the song had finished vibrated with the sound of the soprano voice, the final words... For now is Christ risen from the dead, the first fruits of them that sleep... bittersweet. Jenny knew that none who fell here at Monte Cassino or during the imminent invasion would rise; that all the men around her, including Jack, might tomorrow be the ones to sleep forever.
***
On their way back down, they filled the silence with pragmatic chatter as if they could keep the emotions of the morning at bay by talking of mundane things. Jenny filled the major in on her unconventional upbringing entertaining him with stories of getting trapped inside a Byzantine tomb when she was seven, losing her balance and sliding a hundred feet down in Amazonian mountainside when she was eleven, and discovering her first fossil when she was fourteen. She left out with small detail that that was the age of which she had also received her first kiss.
"So," she said in conclusion, "I guess you could say I never had much of a chance to spend time in church. At least, not as a congregant. Mostly we explored monastery or temple ruins, looking for artifacts and taking photographs of course." She gave Jack a long look. "I don't usually tell people this, but I've always been somewhat self-conscious about my lack of real journalism experience."
"You shouldn't be," Jack said bluntly, glancing over his shoulder at her. "You speak and write more intelligently than most people I've ever met. You're a lot less troublesome than most of the men they sent over here to photograph and write about the conflict. If I have to loan out one more private to lug around another asshole's goddamn camera bag, I may blow a fuse."
"Hmmm," Jenny mused. "That Irish temper I might pay to see."
Jack gave her a look that spoke volumes. It told her she most certainly did not ever want to see that Irish temper. Her smile faded and she gave him a suitably contrite look. "Besides," he went on evenly, "I think you're the first photojournalist I've ever met who speaks fluent Italian. You won Natalia's heart that first night."
Jenny felt her heart flutter and constrict at his mention of a little girl. "When you mentioned that, about sending her to London to boarding school, well, I have to admit, Major, I started to think it was the only thing I wouldn't regret about leaving here."
Jack gave her an odd look. "Why would anyone regret leaving this hell hole?" he asked.
She looked at him steadily. They were on more level ground now and she could walk beside him and read his expressions, his nuances. "I think you would," she said softly. "I think if you had to leave these men it would break your heart, major."
Jenny thought she saw a muscle in his jaw tick, but he showed little other emotion than that. "It would be hard to entrust these blockheads to another commander," he finally admitted, bringing her delighted smile to Jenny's face.
She decided to forgo the serious talk for the rest of their walk to the field hospital. "So, tell me about your upbringing."
"I grew up in New York," Jack revealed, taking Jenny by the hand and carefully helping her leap down the last bit of rocky slope. "My dad was a minister, then an Army chaplain during the Great War. He was killed when I was six and Pat was eight, just before the Germans surrendered." He paused before continuing. "Our mother was never in very strong health. She followed less than a year later."
Jenny put a hand on his arm. "I'm so sorry," she said sincerely. "Who raised you and your brother?"
"Our grandfather. He lives in the city." Jacke seemed to be suddenly tight-lipped, and Jenny took it as a sign he was done talking about that part of his life.
"Is that what you plan to do when the war is over? Follow in your father's footsteps as a minister? Or do you plan to make the Army your career?"
He gave her another one of his dazzling grins, his odd look of a moment ago gone. "Please tell me you're not doing a human-interest story on me."
Jenny raised her eyebrows in surprise. "I am a journalist, major. But no. I understand your innate shyness and mysterious nature wouldn't permit such a thing." She bit her lip to keep from laughing and purposely turned her head away from him.
But it was no good. She could still feel his eyes upon her and she slowly lifted her lashes to meet his gaze. "You do have a way with words," he murmured. "All joking aside, I think you're probably the only photojournalist who can do justice to all this. And for what it's worth, I also think all these new rules are bullshit."
Jenny felt her heart clench with thankfulness at his words, but all she could do was offer him a tight smile and a nonchalant shrug of her shoulders. "I think you'll make a fine preacher one day with eloquence like that," she quipped.
Jack threw his head back and laughed. "That'll be the day!" They had finally reached the jeep and stopped, the moment of parting sobering. "Look, I know it's too much to ask you to stay out of trouble..."
Jenny cocked her head to one side, smiling sweetly at him but listening intently, her heart racing, wondering what his next words would be.
"So, I'm just going to say this. If you somehow contrive to get yourself back to the front with your camera and your typewriter, could you at least promise me you won't get yourself killed?"
Jenny stared up into his harsh, masculine face, her eyes dancing all over the chiseled planes and lines that had been carved there from months, not even years, of war. There was no more teasing, no more flirting between them. Major Jack Delaney was deadly serious, his intense eyes boring into hers and demanding her acquiescence. Somewhere, faint and far off but loud enough so that they both heard, a gramophone from the camp played an Italian song: a bell-like soprano resembling Leah's singing Mascagni's Sancta Maria. A beautiful, sad remnant of what this country once was and could be again if the Allies succeeded. She swallowed hard and gave him a single nod.
"I can only make that promise under one condition, major," she said finally.
Jack drew himself up to his full height, his expression wary and reproachful as if he knew what was coming. "And what's that, lieutenant?"
"You have to make me the same promise."
Jack started to shake his head. "Jenny, you know I can't..."
"Then I won't make any promises either."
The minutes were ticking by. They faced off in a silent impasse wondering when on earth this sudden caring for each other had sprung up between them. Jenny wanted to say that it was the advent of Natalia into her life, and the thought that Jack was all the little girl had. But no. If she was honest with herself, it had started long before that. It had started in a muddy, bloody, violent foxhole during a firefight with the Germans. The faint, crackling Italian aria began to crescendo, and it was almost more than Jenny could stand. She felt a stinging, familiar pressure behind her eyes.
"You have to go," Jack finally said in a quiet voice, opening the door to the jeep. "Get in."
Jenny did as he told her, keeping her eyes glued to his face the entire time. Challenging him. Worrying him. And even after he had closed the door, he still stood there staring down at her.
Private Owens quickly broke the spell by sliding into the driver's seat and soon the jeep's engine roared to life.
Jenny never lost contact with Jack's eyes as Owens put the jeep in gear and pressed the gas, making her jerk forward, grabbing the dashboard for dear life as the jeep raced off down the muddy lane, the major standing there staring after her until they could no longer see each other.