"What the hell? Did Eisenhower just arrive behind us?" Jenny asked as she jumped out of the jeep to rowdy applause. She made a show of looking around for the celebrated supreme commander of the Allied forces.
Jack grinned at her. "You really don't know, do you?" he asked.
Jenny's brows shot up. "Know what?"
She could see nothing worth applauding and didn't understand until a second later when two GIs she knew, Owens and Casey, stepped forward and grabbed her in a huge tight double embrace. Owens wore a bandage on his hand. He had sliced his palm with a knife, he explained bashfully, and Jenny smiled at his obvious proneness to fortunately minor accidents.
"My girl is prouder of me now than when I was shipped over here," he said, looking as if he was at last growing into himself. He was taller and more filled out, despite the rations, and using more words than he had ever managed with her before. "Every time she shows her friends the picture of me in Vogue, they just about die of envy and wish I was theirs instead!"
Casey, who obviously hadn't had his confidence shaken out of him by the war was grinning, his sea blue eyes full of mischief as he erupted into laughter at the thought of Owens being so in demand, and Jenny smiled. Then another man pressed to the front of the group and embraced her. His face looked somewhat familiar.
"I was on the mountain at Easter," he said, and Jenny realized she had photographed him, the look on his face so fervently prayerful, her camera having caught, in that moment and in that one man, what every other man there had been feeling. Several other men came forward and either took her hand or patted her on the back and she offered them smiles all around, overwhelmed at the flood of attention and adoration. Jack stood back, arms crossed, watching the whole tableau unfold with amusement and satisfaction written plainly on his face.
Then Casey said, rather unexpectedly and seriously for once, "One of those graves at Omaha belongs to one of my high school buddies. His mom was happy to know he had been buried with friends."
All Jenny could do was squeeze his hand. As each man clamored to tell her about the picture she had taken of him, or his brother or friend or neighbor, or of the story she had written him into, she was swept off to the mess tent by a wave of admiring men, deposited at a table and given a tin mess tray.
"C-rations," Jenny said, breathing in the smell of meat and vegetables she was sure she would never have eaten two years ago but that now looked better than caviar. "And bread with real butter! I haven't seen anything other than a K-ration in two weeks!"
"Then you should have this to go with it," Jack said passing her a mug with what she assumed might be coffee and discovered was cider when she took too large a swallow. Her eyes widened in surprise.
"Geez Louise!" she exclaimed, much to Jack's delight.
He gestured behind him to a cider barrel. "We found it and thought it would be a shame to waste it. Especially now that we have a week off."
He handed her a cigarette.
"Ahhh, Lucky Strikes," she sighed delightedly as he lit her up. "They only have Chesterfields at the hospital. You know, I might never leave here," she declared, stretching her long model's legs out in front of her and crossing her booted feet.
At which the men cheered, as if they'd be more than happy to have her stay. While she chatted over dinner with Jack and the other men and put the Rollei into service, all Jenny could think was at last she had found a place where she felt she belonged.
***
After dinner, Jack stayed true to his word and took Jenny out to a spot not far from camp but far enough to safely practice shooting her new Colt. As Jack explained the intricacies of the firearm to her, Jenny suddenly found her palms sweaty and her heart pounding nervously in her chest at the idea of actually having to use it to defend herself, to take another human life.
After a brief lesson on loading and handling the gun safely, Jack held it out to her. Jenny hesitated only a second before wrapping her hand around the gun, carefully keeping her forefinger out of the trigger housing as Jack had shown her until she was ready to actually pull the trigger.
He stood behind her and corrected her stance several times before he would actually let her fire. Jenny, determined to hit her targets on the first fire, listened to Jack's softly murmured instructions and did everything he told her to so as not to waste ammunition. Later, when he examined the holes she had put in the board they were using as a target, Jack's lips twisted and what might have been an amused smile or a grimace. Jenny wasn't sure.
"Well?" She looked up at him nervously and bit her lip.
Jack's eyes met hers and the grimace finally softened into a smile. "You'll do. I hope you never have to use it, but if you do, you're ready."
Jenny smiled in relief. She knew Jack wouldn't say that unless it was true. He was the last man on earth to bullshit and she appreciated that. After that, Jack and Jenny strolled through the camp, stopping every now and then to talk with one of the soldiers.
The ones who had known Natalia in Italy asked about her.
"We've all had to find new good luck charms now that we no longer have Natty," Casey said. "My buddy gave me this before he died." He held up a much-tarnished St. Christopher's medal between his fingers, his boyish smile for once poignant as if he were trying his damnedest to hold back tears.
Jenny studied him, wondering if she had misjudged him when she first met him in the jeep in London, wondering whether he had more substance than she had thought. Or if war had deepened his character.
"Would you mind if I photographed your lucky charms?" she asked the soldiers, looking at Jack for permission, knowing the pictures of the men with their new talismanic objects would be a moving follow-up to her Natalia story.
Jack nodded and the men rose to their feet. They crossed the field, past lines of washing strung from tent to tent, past water bags swinging from tripods, past a phonograph with Jo Stafford singing into the night. Inside each tent she saw the same thing...war-touched GIs transformed into heartbreakingly young boys and their good luck charms:
The Domino sugar tablet that one carried with him since Italy because, he said in a terrible understatement, life in Europe was damn short on sweet stuff; the red tin of Tuxedo Club pomade that had sat in another man's pocket and deflected a bullet; the sweet-smelling green wrapper from a cake of Camay soap that a WAC with a lovely smile had given another as a keepsake because she'd had nothing else to give him.
There were also the much folded and studied photographs of mothers or wives or girlfriends or dogs or even horses. And strangers like her. So many of the men had pictures of beautiful women from magazines or calendars, their faces and bodies creased into pocket-sized shapes. What did those pictures remind the men of? Jenny wondered as she saw, many times, the photograph of her naked back, the one the PRO in Italy had ruined for her.
And another that she had forgotten: Jennifer Snow in a floor sweeping Worth ball gown with a full princess skirt, thin straps crisscrossing her back, which was otherwise bare, the fabric having been scooped away down to her sacrum. She looked as if she had no place in this world she now found herself in, as if she came from another universe entirely and that was, she supposed, the point of the pictures. They were the only means, out here, by which beauty could be held in the men's hands. And perhaps the pictures reminded each GI that there was another world besides this one, a world they could return to, if only they survived.
Jenny kept smiling as if it wasn't at all disconcerting to know that so many men kept pictures of her. After one over-eager private asked if she would go to dinner with him in Paris once it was liberated and she had gently deflected him, she saw Jack studying her face closely.
And as they slowly walked through the camp, circling back to the quiet edge where she'd had her shooting practice, Jenny pondered that off look on Jack's face until they rounded a corner and he abruptly stopped, turning to face her.
"Thanks, Jenny," he said, his eyes dark and unfathomable in the shadows of the tents.
She stared up at him for the space of a heartbeat before replying. He was backlit by the moon, which Jenny knew probably made her face a wash with moonlight, completely exposed and vulnerable to him. "For what?" she inquired in a soft whisper.
He looked away from her for only a fraction of a second, tilting his head to indicate the camp full of men whose morale she had no doubt boosted that night. "For everything you've done. Which is more than you can possibly know. They needed that."
Jenny was speechless, beyond touched, and unable to think of a thing to say. Probably unable to even say it if she could have because of the huge lump that suddenly formed in her throat. She tried swallowing, blinking her eyes which were rapidly filling up with tears. She did not want to cry again in front of him. She gave him a tight smile and a small shrug of one of her shoulders.
"I didn't do anything, Jack," she finally managed.
He didn't reply to that, but stepped closer to her, the expression on his face serious, the furrow between his dark brows deepening. Jenny was no inexperienced deb; she knew what it meant, just as she knew deep in her heart that he was about to ruin their friendship and she was about to let him. She responded by moving closer to him as well until they were nearly touching.
Jenny's breath caught and her lips parted as she watched his eyes searching her face, her heart melting and she realized how very easy it would be in that moment...
"Ah-hem!"
Casey cleared his throat behind them. "Sir, there's a man asking for Lieutenant Snow." He addressed Jack, his eyes darting nervously to Jenny though.
Jenny and Jack jumped apart as guiltily as two teenagers caught sparking in the rumble seat of her father's car. Jenny self-consciously smoothed her hair back and looked at the private with a small, innocent smile.
"A man?" Jack inquired, his jaw ticking unhappily.
Casey raised his eyebrows. "Yes, sir. He said his name was..."
"Warren Moore." A voice Jenny recognized all too well cut across Casey's. "It came to my attention that you were missing," Warren said walking up beside Jenny. "I was about to put an order out on you to be apprehended and taken back to London."
Jenny turned to look at him, giving him her sweetest smile, and batting her eyelashes at him to hide her anger and frustration. "Why, Officer Moore. Did you miss me?" she asked sarcastically.
She was acutely aware of the many eyes on her, eyes belonging to men whose stories she had been photographing for the past hour, men who were treating her like she was one of them, a beautiful illusion that Warren Moore was about to destroy by making them think she was his possession and worthy only of contempt and derision.
Her heart sank as she saw that he no longer looked cowed and weary but rejuvenated and as malicious as ever and his sudden appearance told her that he had not let go of his vendetta. Fury clogged her throat at the thought that perhaps this was what he meant by his threat in the bar at the Savoy; that every time she thought she was happy, and doing a good job, he would appear and destroy everything.
And then she realized he had someone with him, someone she knew.
She froze, eyes fixed on Andre Robard's face. No. This couldn't be happening. The smile on Andre's face was not one of joy at seeing her. It was the same callous smirk he had tossed at her the Stork Club in Manhattan the night she found out he had sold her off to the highest bidder. She knew instantly that it wasn't coincidence he had pulled up with Warren. And if she thought that she was mad at a moment ago, now she was raging, like white phosphorus.
"Jennifer, mon ange," Andre drawled in his heavy French accent as if they were breezy acquaintances.
Before the exchange could go any further, before Jenny could speak, before her anger collided with her hurt that Andre, a man she had once loved, would betray her again, Jack stepped forward.
"I'm Lieutenant Colonel Delaney," he said to Warren. "You might remember me from the last time you tried to lock Lieutenant Snow up." Jack didn't let Warren interrupt. "I'm the CO here. I heard that Lieutenant Snow had been eating K-rations for two weeks even though the recommended length of time is ten days. I thought she needed to be shown some hospitality. She's not missing. I and everyone here knows exactly where she is. Her orders say she can leave the field hospital with permission from a CO. I gave her that permission."
"That's not what her orders mean," Warren said, anger roughening his voice. "It means the CO of the hospital."
"It doesn't say that," Jack replied evenly. "It just says permission from a CO."
Of course Warren was too good to show how he felt at being dressed down by a combat-hardened lieutenant colonel. "I'm just looking out for those of the weaker sex. Nobody can blame a man for that. But I see she has you to take over from where Andre left off."
Warren smirked at Jack. Andre grinned at Warren.
That Andre would find satisfaction in watching someone smear her reputation made Jenny finally explode. Her hands curled into tight fists at her sides.
"Oh, yes!" she spat, "How very right you are, Officer Moore! How very clever of you!" She gestured to Jack. "Even though Lieutenant Colonel Delaney has been fighting for more than thirty days without rest, we've managed to conduct a clandestine sexual relationship in which I, with no jeep mind you, run through the ack-ack bombing each night to find whatever trench or tent or abandoned village his battalion is holed up in, have glorious, frenzied sex with him without anybody else seeing or hearing, then run back through the ack-ack bombing to arrive at my tent at the hospital just in time to get up and face the new day, fresh as a daisy, ready to go to work." She laughed bitterly, almost hysterical. "Bravo, Officer Moore! You've uncovered my dirty little secret. But you know, it's hard to see how that kind of stamina would make me a member of the weaker sex!"
Stunned silence greeted Jenny's outburst, but Warren's eyes held hers, with a kind of acquisitive loathing on his face, and the fury she had felt before twisted into a sharp and painful fear. One day, Lieutenant Snow, she remembered he had said. She broke the stare first, her gaze falling away only to land on Andre's face which was, at that moment, the less malevolent of the two. He was staring at her, open-mouthed, in wide-eyed astonishment as if he didn't know her anymore. She looked down, panting with anger, unable to meet anyone's gaze, least of all Jack's. It was like the silence after a bomb detonating. Damning and devastating.
Then Casey, unable to hold it in anymore, exploded into laughter, setting off each of the other men in turn. Jack's voice broke through the noise, silencing it for the most part although the occasional snort of laughter could still be heard.
"Private Casey, escort Officer Moore and...his friend back to his jeep. Owens, take Lieutenant Snow back to the hospital."
Oh God, what had she done?
Realization hit her with the force of a shell explosion. After inviting her to dinner, she had repaid Jack by publicly losing her temper and saying things that no woman should ever say aloud. No wonder his mouth was set in a very grim line. No wonder he was sending her off with Owens. She was mortified but she knew better than to give Warren the satisfaction of looking back over her shoulder at Jack and thus confirming his ridiculous suspicions.
She turned on Andre when they reached the jeeps. "What are you doing here?"
"Taking pictures," he replied. "I do know how to do that, remember?"
"I remember," she said with quiet resentment.
She felt nothing for Andre anymore, she realized then, not even a latent fondness for the man who had been there for her when her parents died. Not even dislike for the lover who had turned traitor on her in New York and who was now palling up to a man who wished her ill.
Out here in France, beside men who kept soap wrappers in their pockets so they wouldn't get shot, Andre Robard and Warren Moore were a waste of her time. And the only thing she could think about on the way to the hospital was Jack's too-stern face after she had yelled about sleeping with him at the top of her voice to Warren, ensuring everyone in the vicinity could hear. And the moment they had shared just before Casey interrupted them that had felt more explosive, more momentous, than anything she'd ever done with Andre.
What must Jack think of her now?
***
But she never got the chance to find out what Jack thought because Rennes was taken soon after and it began again: the pre D-Day sequestering of the women. They were all rounded up, taken out of their hospitals or WAC encampments, a dozen of them, and kept in the custody of Moore and another PRO in a tiny hotel in Rennes until Paris was back in Allied hands, safe and sound.
They had to sign in and sign out every day. They had to get a leave pass to have lunch outside the hotel. One of the other female correspondents actually reported two of their number, claiming they got away and were making for Paris, which was proved false when they returned to the hotel after the dinner for which they had been given a pass into town.
"God damn it!" Jenny exploded when she heard about it. As if it wasn't bad enough having the men in charge treat them like imbeciles, now the women were turning on each other. If only she hadn't gone to Rennes in the first place. If only she had gone AWOL instead.
Jenny was only allowed out of the town after Paris fell. She and Iris Carpenter hitched a ride to the Hotel Scribe, the designated point for all correspondents in Paris. As they came over the hill to the north, Jenny could see the city bathed in sunshine, white and innocent, waiting peacefully as if nothing had ever been the matter and they had all taken too long to arrive. Once through the port of entry, a group of women and girls bearing fresh flowers ran up to Jenny and filled her arms with blooms, calling her la femme soldat.
"Oh no, I'm just a correspondent," she protested, until Iris grabbed Jenny's Leica and took a picture of her, blushing, laden with flowers, the beaming Frenchwomen in the background. It would be a good picture to send back to Natalia, Jenny decided.
The first floor of the Hotel Scribe was taken over by the press office, where the censors scribbled out all the words they didn't want read and correspondents haggled and begged to keep their stories intact. The transportation room was stacked to the ceiling with jerry cans of gasoline. The men had nothing but pay rations and coffee but also, somehow, champagne, which flowed freely.
As soon as she could, Jenny took to the streets, knowing she could find her own damn story rather than waiting for the PROs to tell her what to write about. Her male counterparts, on the other hand, didn't seem in much of a hurry to hunt down their words, not when the ladies of Montmartre required no hunting down whatsoever and need very little persuasion to give up their favors. Jenny lost count of the times she saw correspondents entering and leaving brothels. Sex, it seemed, was easier to procure than nylon hose, and a hell of a lot cheaper.
Jenny looked for stories of women who had done remarkable things throughout the German occupation. A group of resistance fighters from the French Forces of the Interior showed her their hideout in the underground sewer system. She spoke to ordinary women who stole guns from the Germans to help arm the resistance. Those guns fired the shots that had rung out on the day of the rebellion to announce to the city that they should put up their barricades and take back their streets.
Story after story of feminine bravery, and Jenny knew readers of Vogue would love it, especially the pictures of the Parisians in exotic hats laughing and showing off the guns they had stolen from under the noses of the Germans. And then the men of the FFI took Jenny out to the damp tunnels in which the Germans had locked up captured resistors. She discovered that the Germans had left men and women they had captured in the wet, dark tunnels until they died. She was shown the fingernail marks clawed into the walls as the prisoners tried to get their way to freedom.
Jenny returned to the hotel that evening a different person. To witness both matchless barbarism and matchless desperation in the one day left her incapable of speaking.
However, she was smart enough to know that her work was far from over. When she got to her room at the hotel she slipped into the bath. She washed her hair. She applied powder, rouge, lipstick and mascara. She put on the unworn olive drab skirt that the Army had first pressed on her nearly a year ago and left behind the unflattering yet gloriously comfortable jump boots Jack have given her in exchange for black leather pumps. Then she made sure to bump into Major Tom Reynolds in the lobby, the man in charge of public relations.
"Oh, excuse me!" she said to the major after colliding with him. "I've spent the day interviewing the men from the FFI and my head's just full of the story I'll write for Vogue." She assumed a model's stance with her hand on her hip, showing off the figure she had been hiding beneath trousers and dirty shirts for so long. "I sure wish I could interview some American soldiers about their role in the liberation of Paris, otherwise the women who read Vogue might start to think we had nothing to do with it. That it was a French victory rather than an American one."
It was a gamble that worked. The merry blues eyes of Major Reynolds crinkled with pleasure at the sight of her. "My dear, I can get you interviews with as many soldiers as you like by tomorrow if you will just tell me what you need," he replied solicitously.
"The only problem is, major, I'm not allowed out to the front to talk to the men because apparently women are better than men at attracting enemy gunfire," Jenny pouted prettily. "Which does seem rather strange, since I managed to survive Italy and Normandy, and get myself all the way to Paris without a scratch."
"Italy?" the major asked in surprise. "You've been to Italy, young lady?" He sounded impressed.
"Well yes, major," Jenny confirmed. "Why don't we have a drink and I'll tell you all about it?"
The major agreed and so over drinks Jenny told him everything. About the photograph of then Major Delaney holding a little Italian girl, a photograph that had come to represent the acts of charity the Army was capable of, even under fire from the most brutal enemy the country had ever known.
"You're the girl Moore's been talking about," the major suddenly said, pointing a finger at her with the hand that held his cigarette. "I can see why."
Jenny kept her smile on, made it wider even, dropped her chin a little as if a photographer had just told her to seduce the lens. After two whiskeys, Major Tom Reynolds was laughing at Jenny's tales, after three, he was congratulating her for having done so much to keep the women of America behind their men. After four, she stood up and flashed the smile that had once adorned magazine covers.
"Thank you so much for listening, major. I really should go and write my story, one-sided as it might be. If only someone would let the women go where the men are allowed."
Leaving him with that final thought, she turned and sacheted through the lobby as if it were a catwalk and she its star. The next morning, in Jenny's room, she and Iris sat together, praying that Jenny's conversation with Major Reynolds had had an effort.
"I can't even flirt properly anymore," Jenny lamented.
"Give it time," Iris said, but they both knew that time was the one thing they didn't have. The war was marching on without them.
Before Jenny could reply, there was a knock at the door and Iris opened it to find a young private standing there. He saluted the two women and handed them a piece of paper.
"From Major Tom Reynolds," was all he said before turning smartly on his heel and marching off.
The two women stood there stunned and silent, looking down at the piece of paper in Iris's shaking hand, too scared of what it might contain to open it.
Iris looked up at Jenny with fearful eyes. "You don't think it could be a court-martial, do you?"
"We haven't done anything wrong!" Jenny cried in protest. "Here, let me open it. Let's get it over with..."
While Iris turned away, steepling her hands in front of her face as if trying to stem the tears she knew were coming, Jenny tore the letter open and hastily scanned the contents. After she had read it, she slowly made her way over to the table, sat down and rested her elbows on the surface, her head in her hands. Then she began to sob.
Iris rushed over to her. "What is it?" she asked sounding desperate.
Wordlessly, Jenny passed her the letter and Iris read it over and over again as if she couldn't believe her own eyes. "Well, I'll be God damned."
Jenny, her tears finally coming to an end, looked up and laughed, her eyes meeting Iris's own shining gaze. "Tonight, we are going to get stinking drunk. But on champagne, not whiskey!"
For the letter had given Jennifer Snow and Iris Carpenter permission to access all areas. There were no longer only allowed to stay with the nurses. They were allocated jeeps. They were allowed to attend press briefings. To stay at press camps outside Paris. To be told about the day's hot spots and military objectives. To send copy to their newspapers or magazines as soon as the censors had passed it, no longer having to wait until all the men had filed theirs. They even got a cigarette ration.
As long as they found a unit to attach themselves to, Europe was as much theirs as it was the men's. At that thought, Jenny's joy evaporated a little bit. There was only one unit to which she wanted to attach herself, but before she did that she had to think of a way to get Jack to forgive her for her terrible outburst.