“Let’s try,” Jess said. “We can only fail spectacularly.”

Two

We can only fail spectacularly. The words rang in Jess’s mind as she sat, in early 1943—bureaucracy was unfamiliar with the concept of speed—at the State Department offices for one of the meetings that would decide her future. Remove all objections, she told herself as she stared at the ticking clock, more nervous than she’d ever been at any go-see.

At a go-see, she knew there was nothing she could do that hadn’t already been done. Her portfolio had been shot, she had the face and body that she’d been blessed with—dark brown eyes that every photographer she’d ever worked with said they could never do justice to, naturally waving blonde hair that sat a couple of inches above her shoulders, and a figure that had curves in all the right places. But, with this interview at the State Department, everything depended on what she said, not on the way she looked. Perhaps on the way she smiled too—how much would be too much in the eyes of a woman holding all the power to grant Jess a passport to Europe?

Stop it, she told herself, studying the demure and practical Stella Designs black crepe tuxedo trousers and the prim and subdued white cotton shirt she’d paired them with—Stella too, because only Stella shirts came with the white peony over the left breast, which made the outfit more like herself than the person she was pretending to be.

“Miss Jessica May,” a voice called out.

Jessica stood, straightened her back and then realized she was striding down the hall like a model on a catwalk. She tried to correct herself but then couldn’t remember how to walk normally so, in the end, she marched on, hoping to God they’d think she had military precision rather than modelistic pretensions.

“You may sit.” A tall woman—tall enough to have been a damn good model—gestured to a chair.

Jess sat down, and arranged her face in a way that she hoped indicated strength, hardiness and determination.

“I thought I should explain myself,” she began. “I know I must seem an unusual candidate for a passport to Europe to work as a photojournalist. But I possess many advantages that I’m sure some of the men currently over there reporting the war do not. My parents were paleobotanists, you see, and I led a somewhat peripatetic childhood. We followed plant fossils around the world; I lived in or visited South America, the northern territories of Australia, Tahiti, and then we made our way to Europe after my parents’ work began to receive recognition. I lived in France for ten years; I speak the language fluently.” She felt her voice relax as she spoke, confident of her bona fides.

She went on. “As soon as I was old enough, I became my parents’ photographer every summer and often during term time; if they thought they were on the trail of a discovery, my parents would simply take me along, put the Rolleiflex in my hand and ask me to capture whatever they’d found. Since then, I’ve studied at Parsons and received more training in photography from Emile Robard.”