“And here you are now, waiting to take more photos and write a whole lot more pieces about a war.”

“Perhaps it pays to be publicly excoriated and then to go out and get drunk.”

“Sounds like a motto that might hold you in good stead for the next couple of years.” Bel hugged Jess. “I’m going to miss you. When you go. Not if. When.”

Three

The War Department did let her go. Thankfully, the Condé Nast empire’s influence was vast. They made Jess cut her teeth on some home-front reporting of the training of WACs, which Vogue published, and when she managed to do that to everyone’s satisfaction, she was finally given orders to go overseas, not long after her twenty-third birthday.

Thus she became a captain in the U.S. Army—her rank and uniform a courtesy meant only to provide camouflage and to stop her being shot as a spy if she were captured. She was inoculated against tetanus, typhoid and typhus, and given a card from the Adjutant General’s Office of the War Department showing her fingerprints and stating her birth date, hair color, eye color, height, weight, and including a photograph of her looking stunned—it would never make it into the pages of Vogue, she thought with a smile. She kitted herself out in trousers—she packed the two skirts they thrust on her but doubted if skirts and combat zones were a terribly good combination—two men’s army shirts, a tie, her pinks and a green U.S. War Correspondent patch for her jacket and cap.

Her embarkation point was in Brooklyn, where a sergeant looked her over and said, “Virgin?”

Jess couldn’t help laughing. “Only in matters of war,” she replied smoothly and saw every visible piece of his skin flush bright red.

He led her to a warehouse, punishing her with silence for turning his attempt to embarrass her back on him. She was issued a musette bag, a canteen, a helmet, sunglasses that she surreptitiously slipped back into the pile—she knew from being out with her parents that her sunglasses were probably better than anything the United States Army could issue her with. Next came insect powder, which she was used to from paleobotany expeditions, chocolate, mosquito netting and gloves. She added the items to everything she’d brought with her: socks, underwear, cold cream, lipstick and powder, her two cameras, film, lenses, flash bulbs, repair parts, and typewriter paper. Plus a Stella Designs dress, made especially for her by Estella Bissette, from the lightest silk, which folded down to fit into the palm of her hand. Thankfully she’d been allowed to have her Hermes baby typewriter go as an extra piece of baggage, rather than having to fit that into her bag as well.

She’d done her homework and asked to go to Italy where the nurses, she’d been told, were closer to the front than they’d been in any other war. As a woman, Jess wasn’t allowed to cover the actual war. Just the ancillaries. So her destination was Naples, recently liberated by the U.S. Army, and her orders were to record the work of the nurses for the readers of Vogue.