The Undaunted

May the Best Man Win

I'd have to cut out her heart to stop her from talking about Jenny, Jack wanted to shout. Instead, he turned on his heel and strode out the door.

***
That afternoon, another story came in. And more pictures.

As Jack studied them, he could see, now that Natalia had lifted the blindfold, that the pictures were taken either by Jenny or a very skilled copycat. One was solarized perfectly, a technique that so few photojournalists would bother with, but which it always been one of Jenny's trademarks. He read over the article and now he knew why yesterday's had punched him so hard in the gut: her phrasing was everywhere, the whisper of her voice in his ear as he read.

Again and again, over and over, she described the Nuremberg trials as the act of "hope" among the eighteen nations convicting the remaining members of the Nazi party...hope that this judging body of nations would guard against such a thing ever happening again; hope that a world so torn apart could be rebuilt; hope...because without hope we cannot live. Hope. Hope. Always hope...like the refrain of a poignant song.

And so, it went on, every day. Each time he went out for a quick drink at the bar down the road where the newspaper men congregated, he was asked about his new correspondent. Everyone assumed the mysterious stringer was a man. Nobody suspected it was Jennifer Snow.

Who is it, Jack? Where'd you meet him?

Someone I met in the army, Jack would answer half truthfully, and the person he was talking to would groan and slap him on the back and curse Jack's good fortune: to have survived the war unscathed, and to have unearthed a photojournalist from the rubble of that war who had lifted the bar so high, the rest of them could do nothing but walk underneath it.

He spent a week wound tight with fury, that Jenny would reach out to him like this, professionally but not personally. Still, he read each dispatch from her as it came in, searching for a message, a hidden clue, but he found nothing. And so he said nothing. Did nothing. Until he heard himself shouting angrily at his editors in the morning meeting and realized that, even under intense fire from the Germans, he had never shouted at his men before. He had lost it, he realized.

He closed the meeting, picked up his hat, locked his office door and left, driving upstate to nowhere he thought, until he found himself driving in a familiar tree-lined neighborhood and turned into a driveway at the house where Owen's parents had lived for the past thirty some odd years.

"Just the man I want to thank," Mrs. Owens said as she embraced him and poured coffee for him and cut him an enormous slice of pound cake. "I think you must have had the hardest job in the war, keeping my son alive. I expected he'd be returned to me with at least a few scratches, but he looks the same as always.'

Jack smiled. "He didn't tell you about the broken bones?"

"I can't see those. They must have healed up just fine." Mrs. Owens sipped her coffee from a worn, chipped mug that had seen better days. "I still can't believe the two of you used to hide frogs in the girls' beds but for three years gone you were fighting a war. And doing an excellent job of it too, I hear."

"I just did what everyone else did. No more. No less." The reply rolled off Jack's tongue the way it always did, succinct and a little clipped, signifying that they should talk about something else. Because how could anyone do an excellent job of leading men to their deaths or, if not death, serious injury? How could anyone look at Ashton and say he had done an excellent job?

"What's he doing now?" Jack asked. "The end was such a rush that I didn't get a chance to find out whether he was coming up here to stay with you or going back to the city."

Mrs. Owens pushed her plate away. "I'd appreciate you speaking to him for me. He always listens to you. Looks up to you. He's a little...lost."

"That can't be right." The vehemence in Jack's voice surprised them both. He paused and ate a mouthful of cake before he continued. "I just meant that he was a stronger man at the end than he was at the beginning. I thought he'd land on his feet."