The Girl in the Blue Beret

by Bobbie Ann Mason

  The agent’s directions had been precise. Find the girl in the blue beret. She will have a timetable and a leather school bag.

  Marshall remembered that moment vividly. She was waiting there, her blue beret standing out like a flower against the barren winter gardens of the Tuileries.

  There was still a bench in that area. Not the same bench, he thought, but it was in approximately the same place.

  But no, he was wrong. When he saw her on the bench, Delancey hadn’t been with him. He and Delancey had first seen her at the train station. Why did he meet her in the Tuileries? Then he remembered.

  As he neared the place de la Concorde, he thought of the Concorde—the SST. He wished it would fly over, a happy coincidence, tying history in a knot. Moments of history entwined here—Marie-Antoinette lost her head; the Egyptian obelisk replaced the guillotine; Napoléon dreamed the triumphant arch. Marshall felt his own history emanate from him, as if he been holding it condensed in a small spot inside himself. Reviewing his past was new for Marshall, something that had started as he approached his sixtieth birthday—and retirement. Tomorrow was his final flight.

  FOR YEARS, MARSHALL had dreaded retirement. Mandatory premature retreat, he called it, infuriated at the federal law. He hated being forced out. He was perfectly healthy, and he had stopped smoking ten years ago. Asking a pilot to stop flying was like asking a librarian to burn books. Or a pianist to close the lid forever. Or a farmer to buy a condo in the city. His mind entertained new metaphors every day.

  Retirement would be like the enforced passivity he had endured during the war, after the crash landing. Then, he was a caged bird.

  The airline didn’t want rickety, half-blind ancients at the controls. Screw the airline, he thought now. Roaming Paris, he composed the thousandth rebuttal he would never send in: Since being let go on account of advanced age and feebleness, I’ve been forced to adopt a new career. Henceforth, I shall guide hikers up Mont Blanc, and on my days off I’ll be going skydiving.

  The pilots Marshall hobnobbed with might talk about investments, or summer homes, or time-share condos, but none of them really cared about anything except flying. One former B-24 pilot golfed, and an ex-fighter jock intended to sail his deep-draft sloop around the world someday, but Marshall thought their pastimes were half-hearted substitutes. He was interested in everything to do with aviation, and he was always reading, but he thought hobbies were silly. Collecting swizzle sticks or crafting model airplanes—he couldn’t imagine. Whenever he thought of what to do with his retirement, he drew a blank. Pushing the throttles forward, racing down the runway, feeling the wings gain lift, pulling the yoke back and aiming high into the sky—that’s what his pilot friends really wanted. That’s what he wanted.

  Marshall wandered down a street of five-story apartment buildings. This was the lovely, proportionate architecture he remembered.

  The people who had helped him in Paris during the war would be retired now, he thought. The French retired young. Robert? Rohbehr. Marshall didn’t recall the young man’s last name, but he would never forget him. Robert and his clandestine missions. He remembered Robert appearing in the small hours of the morning with an urgent message. He remembered Robert letting his rucksack fall to the floor, then reaching in like a magician to produce cigarettes or a few priceless eggs. Once, he pulled out an actual rabbit, skinned and purple. From inside the lining of his coat came thin papers with secret messages. Whatever happened to him after the war?

  3.

  MARSHALL ALWAYS ARRIVED EARLY FOR HIS FLIGHTS. HE TRIED to nap in the pilots’ ready-room at Charles de Gaulle Airport. He hadn’t slept well, his final B-17 mission blending in his dreams with the 747 he would be flying across the ocean for the last time. He read the newspapers and stoked up on coffee and peanuts. In his experience, peanuts balanced the caffeine turbulence without cutting the uplift of the caffeine itself. He wanted that uplift today. The night before, several of the crew had taken him out for a retirement wingding, complete with a late-night frolic at the Folies de Pigalle. He could hardly pay attention to the titillation, for thinking of his visit in Belgium.

  Today his first officer, Erik Knopfler, who was twenty years Marshall’s junior, caught him trying to nap. “Hey, old man, getting your beauty sleep? That’s what you get for staying out late partying.”

  “Yeah, they’re telling me I’m old. ‘Happy birthday, here’s your burial plot.’ ”

  Carl Reasoner, the flight engineer, joined them. He said, “I know we’re always razzing you senior guys, but Marshall, I’d rather fly with you than most of these guys today coming out of Vietnam.”

  “That goes for me too,” said Erik.

  “Well, thanks, guys. I appreciate that. I walked all the hell over Paris yesterday, and my heart runs like a top. Yet they say I’m too old.”

  “Oh, we have to get rid of you, you know,” said Erik with a laugh. “We don’t want you old guys hogging all of the seniority.”

  “That’s diplomatic,” Marshall said. “Just wait till you hit the big six-O!”

  In the washroom, Marshall spruced up and gave himself the once-over in the mirror. Loretta would have wanted him to look good on his final flight. He couldn’t be sixty, he thought.

  At the dispatch office, he checked the weather forecast and worked out the fuel load. Then he stopped at scheduling, where he gave the crew his captain’s briefing. He tried to be august as he presented the flight plan and ran the crew through routine checks. He dwelled too long on ditching procedures, but he didn’t want to slight anything. And instead of leaving it to the first officer, he would do the damn walk-around himself this time, he thought. He wanted to kick the tires. One last time.

  After the briefing, Erik ogled an attractive flight attendant in a short skirt as she descended the stairway.

  “I’d like to see her twist down the aisle of the plane like that,” he said. “But man, the girls on my last flight must have come from the Salvation Army.”

  “They were better in the old days, huh, Marshall?” Carl was teasing him again. “Everything was better then, I hear.”

  “Naturally.”

  Marshall set off for the plane, his travel bag in one hand and his “brain bag”—his flight manuals, maps, flashlight, and hijacker handcuffs—in the other. He felt pleased by the respect the younger guys gave him. “Bus driver!” his son, Albert, then a teenager, had once taunted him.

  Marshall was prepared for hijackings, bombings, unruly passengers. He had to be ready with his skill, his sang-froid, his instantaneous judgment, his focus. He had learned to make his eyes radiate alertness. He practiced unblinkingness. He could go sixty-four seconds without blinking. He had to ease up a bit when he began to need artificial tears. He hated having to carry a bottle of eyedrops.

  He jokingly called the younger pilots whippersnappers. He had been one himself. The one who crashed the B-17. He quickly corrected that thought. He was the one who safely brought down the wounded bomber.

  THAT MORNING HE was especially careful in the cockpit, concentrating fiercely on every item as the first officer went down the checklist. It was so easy to make a simple mistake. He wanted to savor the joy of the takeoff, the sweep of the flight, with his mind fully at ease. The 747 lacked the more intimate contact with the ground and sky that he had known in smaller planes, but it had grandeur. It conferred distinction. The captain of such a mighty vessel had reason to be proud. He loved to taxi. He loved to lift. Sometimes he forgot to breathe, he loved it so.

  He took off, banked, trimmed, and set the course. He was climbing, due west. Soon he was flying past Rouen, Le Havre, Caen, Bayeux, Sainte-Mère-Église. He was flying above the Normandy beaches. Sword Beach. Juno. Gold. Omaha. Utah. So often when he flew out of Paris or London, he imagined what it would have been like if he could have flown on D-Day. But he never got that chance. He had flown only ten missions, and all his months of expensive training had ended in a fiasco in a bumpy field in Belgium.

  Yet t
he people he met in Belgium remembered him and the crew. They had hidden three of them from the Germans and tended to the wounds of others. They had dwelt on the crash for all these years. It had become part of the local lore, a mythology. The day the aviators fell from the sky. He remembered that field in Belgium during the war with devastating clarity, but the people were unknown to him. And now Marshall knew that one of them had died protecting a young, lost American.

  Passing control over to Erik, Marshall sat back. His eyes scanned the instruments automatically, monitoring the machine as he had done innumerable times before.

  He had tried to put the war behind him, but sometimes it surfaced. Over the years he thought from time to time about the girl in the blue beret and wondered what had become of her. A twinge of regret fluttered deep inside him now, and this feeling, like his earlier tears, surprised him.

  THE FLIGHT HOME was routine, fairly smooth, until they hit a light chop over Newfoundland and Marshall had to speak to the passengers about seat belts. He didn’t get chatty, the way some pilots did. Just fly the goddamn plane, he told himself.

  As they neared New York, the purser got on the intercom to tell everyone that this was the final flight of their captain’s career.

  “Land, ho,” Erik said now. “I guess you won’t miss flying in weather.”

  “I’ll take weather,” he said. “Gladly.”

  He had a bad horizon going in, with a carpet of popcorn clouds, but they cleared as the plank shape of Long Island came into view. Now began the most challenging part of any flight—the landing. Marshall leaned forward. They were easing down to lower altitude, and the swamplands of JFK were becoming distinct. Marshall had always enjoyed the low-altitude stages of flight, when details of the landscape became plain. Today the egrets wading in the swamp looked like flags of surrender.

  He made the turn toward Long Beach, over the inlets and swamp to the beckoning runway.

  The landing was buffeted a little by crosswinds. He turned into the wind, sidling like a crab as he maneuvered against it. They were over the threshold. He pulled the yoke slightly, flaring. They were centered above the runway.

  “Forty, thirty, twenty,” Erik called out.

  Marshall pressed the rudder pedal. The nose swung around just as the main gear kissed the concrete. Perfectly aligned, the big ship settled to earth. Kicking the crab out, it was called.

  “Nice,” said Erik.

  “See. It’s still possible to actually fly a plane once in a while.”

  Marshall heard the intercom click on and then some kind of staticky noise. He began to grin, realizing he was hearing applause from the passengers. He was being sent out on a high note, and he found it gratifying.

  4.

  MARSHALL HAD WANTED TO SNEAK OUT OF THE AIRPORT, but the crew waylaid him with a brief farewell ceremony of plaudits and pranks. The purser gave him a teddy bear dressed in a pioneer flight suit, complete with goggles and a little leather helmet.

  “Sure you got all your paperwork done, Marshall?” a junior pilot asked, kidding.

  “I’ll have nightmares about that,” Marshall said.

  “That’s the thing. More time on paperwork than jiggling the yoke.”

  “Aviation has gotten so bureaucratic that even us superheroes have trouble,” Marshall said. He had perfected an avuncular chuckle as a filler for idle conversation.

  It was always strange to enter a new decade, he thought as he closed his logbook. It was as if you were allowed for a moment into the workings of time before easing back into the usual steady pace of life. The disbelief that greeted a new decade was a defense against disappearance. Perhaps after he had passed the hurdle of the new decade, the dread would even out and he would simply continue his life. He had imagined retirement as a looming wall, with a lawn chair parked in front, but now he did a little skip at the end of the escalator, a spontaneous grace note of anticipation. Screw the airline.

  For the first time in years, he wasn’t required to drop off his passport at the scheduling office.

  He found his Honda Civic, its silvery gray like an emblem of age, and drove home as if on autopilot. He always found that the wheel-clutching demands of driving a mere automobile were minor trifles. On the four-lanes he could zip around lumbering trucks and keep the accelerator even, but on streets, with their stop signs and intermittent shopping strips, he grew inattentive.

  “I hope you don’t fly that plane the way you’re driving this car,” Loretta had said once. Most of the time she pretended his driving was like Apollo at the reins of his chariot.

  As he passed the garbage mountain near Rahway, glittering with green glass, he remembered Loretta saying it sparkled like the aquamarine of the Mediterranean Sea. It’s garbage, he pointed out. His career had liberated him from the kind of work done by most men. He couldn’t imagine himself driving a bulldozer, sculpting refuse. He ascended, bursting through the cloud layers, rising, rising, scooting through the atmosphere, leveling off at thirty-six thousand feet. The jets, the bumping through clouds, the speed—it was like sex, with much more at stake. Sometimes he imagined he could just keep rising until he reached the moon. He thought now about the time, just before Apollo 11, when Neil Armstrong was practicing on the flying-bedstead lunar trainer, a framework contraption that hovered. The thing went kerflooie, spun out of control, and Armstrong hit the eject button at the last possible millisecond. Matter-of-factly, he parachuted to the ground, shucked the chute, and was back at his desk in thirty minutes. He didn’t even mention the incident to his office mate. Just another day on the job.

  ALTHOUGH BASED AT JFK, Marshall lived in New Jersey. From the air, the landscape made sense to him, but on the ground the suburbs were a meaningless hodgepodge of deadpan houses and noxious shopping centers. Loretta had flourished in the suburbs. She knew the neighborhood of the school and the streets where she took Albert and Mary to harp and flute lessons when they were growing up. Yet she remained devoted to Cincinnati, her hometown, and she had gone there often, with the children, even after her parents were dead. His own parents died long ago, and he had lost touch with all other kin in Cincinnati and down in the Kentucky mountains.

  The Stones’ house was a two-story, green-clapboard colonial hedged with boxwood. The interior was feminine throughout, except for his wood-paneled study, with its somber barometer and photographs of DC-3s and the beloved old Connie—the Constellation, the most satisfying airplane he had ever flown. He had always been like a special guest in this house, someone who dropped in every week or so. Loretta played her part as hostess. Home life had an air of pretense, as if staged. When he was away, did she strike the set?

  Whenever he thought about his role in the family when the kids were young, he teetered off balance. What a fraud he was! What did he know about parenting? He was the dad who took the children to get the Christmas tree, the dad who carved the turkey, the dad who drove the station wagon on summer vacations. On holidays when he had to be away, Loretta simply shifted the date. The turkey waited. Santa too.

  Loretta greeted him sunnily each time he returned. The transition was disorienting. In an airplane, he was perpetually alert, energized, a cat watching a mouse hole. On the ground, his real self floated away. Home was a maze of costumes and allowances and bicycle tires. He stayed in his den for hours on end, absorbed in the ancient Mayans or Viking explorers or Georges Simenon mysteries—in French. He read anything he could get his hands on. He jogged around the high-school track.

  Yet he had held fast to the contract. This home life in New Jersey was what all the sacrifices were for—the training, the war, the job. His nuclear unit ensconced in this fine colonial two-story was his raison d’être. He had no complaint. As a 747 captain, he was a success, and his family was proud of him.

  Now Marshall entered the deserted house, carried his bags up to the den, hung his uniform jacket in the closet, and set his hat on its accustomed shelf. The scrambled-egg brim of the hat seemed to be saying something, but he shut th
e door on its grin. He opened his carry-on bag and pulled out the gift teddy bear by the paw. Its ridiculous little flight suit made a mockery of him. He threw it into the closet, where it landed among a jumble of shoes.

  At his base in England, in his leather flying jacket, he had jokingly called himself the Scourge of the Sky. Then he met those deadly Focke-Wulfs. He had always felt anguish over the loss of the bomber. A B-17 cost a million dollars, big money back then. And it cost forty thousand dollars to train a pilot. That he didn’t get to fly more missions was like a cruel coitus interruptus. He had never gotten over that disappointment.

  He sat in his den, the most comfortable place in the empty house. A tape ran backwards in his mind. His final airline flight, and before that, embarrassing himself in the field in Belgium, and long before that, crash-landing in that field. Once again, he peered through the B-17’s windscreen as he brought the bomber in. The Belgians seemed fixated on the memory of the plane coming down in their field, so close it could have plowed into their church.

  Now something had shaken loose. The distant past was no longer behind him, something to be shoved behind while he forged ahead; now it was in front of him.

  HE HAD TO FIGURE out what to do with the house. Sell it? Turn it over to his kids? He didn’t want to rent it out. That could be a disaster. He wanted to ask Albert to live there, but he doubted Albert would take care of it. Albert’s idea of upkeep was giving himself a biannual hair trim. The house needed some repairs. Loretta had always cautioned against letting the house become an eyesore in the neighborhood. It was on the verge. Marshall sprang into action. The day after his final flight he hired some odd-job guys who promised to come at the end of the month to work on the gutters and windows.