The Girl in the Blue Beret

by Bobbie Ann Mason

  The roar of many thousands of engines was a thunderous symphony. The air was North Pole cold, but the sheepskin-lined helmet and his leather jacket were cozy, and the cockpit had some heat. Farther back, the waist gunners shivered in the open windows, but they wore electric flight suits. In battle they could warm themselves with the heat of their busy guns. Hootie claimed he never noticed the cold.

  At ten thousand feet, they donned their “Halloween masks” for oxygen. They were up too high to smoke, too high to breathe—just when Marshall could have used a cigarette. At twenty thousand feet, he saw the ground as an abstraction, a schematic of peaceful farmland, brown like faded, worn-out rugs. As they flew farther north, snow cover started to appear, until the ground was a patchwork of whites, like overlapping tablecloths of varying pale shades.

  Time passed, the timelessness that takes over when every split second is eternal. It was peaceful—until they met some Messerschmitts he did not care to remember.

  Near target, Al Grainger crawled past the cockpit on his way to the bomb bay to pull the pins.

  “Al’s dressing his eggs!” Hootie yelled through the inter-phone as he always did.

  Webb, the pilot, issued his routine reprimand. “Cut the blab, boys.”

  He transferred control to the bombardier at the IP, the initial point on the approach. As always, Webb said, “O.K., bombardier, you got it.” Easing back from the controls, he joked to Marshall, as always, “Now it’s relax time.”

  Grainger leaned into his bombsight, making only the slightest adjustments of their course. Here in the heart of enemy territory, they stopped all their evasive maneuvers and plowed ahead, straight and level, as if begging the German flak gunners to pick them off. Just when they needed to twist and skitter most, they renounced defensive maneuvers. They drove toward the target until the eggs finally streamed from the Dirty Lily’s belly and the pilots could take control again.

  Marshall heard Grainger call “bombs away.”

  As the bombs—M-17 cluster incendiaries—fell away, the plane lifted like a balloon. Suddenly lightened, she soared with relief.

  12.

  CHARLES DE GAULLE AIRPORT WAS BELLIGERENTLY MODERN, WITH bleak, functional terminals and hangars, but today the morning mist gave the place a touch of mystery.

  I can start life over, Marshall said to himself as he marched through the jetway. He had to, he thought. What else should a retired pilot do but effect un grand changement?

  He hitched a ride into the city with the crew. Captain Vogel had insisted, since Marshall had reserved a room at the regular crew hotel. Accustomed to carry-on bags, the crew had waited for him while he detoured into baggage claim, and after enduring some small talk and inane senior-citizen jokes, here he was again at the familiar place. It was a modest hotel with breakfast in the basement.

  “Bienvenue, Captain Stone,” said Charles, the clerk, an old acquaintance, at the desk. “You fly your airplane to us again.”

  “No, no more.” Marshall touched the sleeve of his blazer. “No uniform this time.”

  “Vacation?”

  “No. I’m retraité. They say I’m too old to fly now.”

  “That is good, Captain! Now you will enjoy yourself.”

  “But flying is what I do, Charles. I’m really a bird!”

  Marshall was pleased that his French was good enough to keep Charles from switching to English.

  His room wasn’t ready. He left his bags with Charles and set out, intending to force himself to stay awake all day by walking the spacious city. On layovers, he usually wandered for hours or went to the movies. He tried to stay on East Coast time, so he was often up late, reading in his room. But now he was going to be on Paris time.

  He walked along the Seine, a long gray stripe through the city, toward Notre Dame. It was a fine June day. He had a kink in his leg. Ever since his wallet was stolen in London a few months earlier, he had been stashing his money in a contraption that fit beneath his trouser leg, even though he suspected it was conspicuous and that every thief knew precisely where to look. It came loose once today, when he was in the toilettes. He readjusted the strap, which now pinched.

  The quai Saint-Michel was crowded, and he hurried to a quieter area. He noticed the fluttering lights and shadows in the young trees on the boulevard. At a sidewalk café he ordered a coffee, and when it came he ordered a sandwich. He had learned to order coffee first. Otherwise the waiters would not bring it until he had finished his sandwich. He always enjoyed his layover routines. He often sat on one of the boulevards at a place like this and read the papers. Smoking used to be essential. Marshall was still tempted at times by a whiff of European tobacco in the street, but sometimes the smell reminded him of the odor of a mangy dog. After quitting, he learned to divert himself by watching people, but they were usually smoking. Today a teenage couple, locked at the waist, sauntered by, each brandishing a cigarette with the free outside hand. He chuckled, thinking of life in a cockpit—the captain and the first officer used the outside hands for the yoke, the inside hands for the throttles. He wondered at the blithe confidence of mothers crossing the street with baby carriages—there were two in sight. He watched well-to-do women in their glad rags, walking dogs smaller than their purses. Young professionals wove among babbling bunches of unself-conscious tourists. A caricature from a Fellini film—heavy make-up, beehive wig, feather boa, platform shoes—paraded past. He liked the way the crowd meandered. They were going to lunch. They were talking. The lone women were conversing with their crazy little dogs.

  He realized that he was scanning the crowd for familiar faces. Fat chance. It bothered him that he couldn’t remember Robert’s last name. He thought he would recognize him if he were to pass by now, almost four decades older but still himself.

  “Désolé.” Someone bumped into his small table. Marshall, glancing up, saw a stooped man with a battered black valise, hurrying on past Marshall’s table.

  Désolé! He was sorry, too. He was always amused that the French were desolated if they were late or jostled you in a crowd or dropped a pea from a fork. He was in a period of desolation, he thought, then quickly checked himself.

  HE DIDN’T KNOW where to begin. In all his years of flying to Paris, he hadn’t been back to the zoo. He hadn’t lingered at any of the train stations. He had never tried to find the Vallon family. He wasn’t sure where they were living when they sheltered him in the spring of 1944. As he walked through the city now, his mind turned the noise and color into tense, quiet, bleached-out scenes, garnished with grim red-and-black flags, the swastikas cartwheeling in the breeze, the ubiquitous cow-manure color of the German uniforms standing in stark relief. One afternoon after school Annette had taken him on a zigzag tour of the sights of Paris. With most of his time spent indoors, he found Paris that day fleeting and bewildering—the grand plazas, the ornate, ancient buildings, the bizarre long-necked Eiffel Tower wearing a gigantic Nazi flag like an apron. Or did he remember that flag from a photograph? He wasn’t sure.

  Annette guided him on other walks close to his hideaway, the Vallons’ apartment. He remembered being careful not to put his hands in his pockets, as Americans did. Don’t jingle your change! he was told. He did not smoke in public, for fear of holding his cigarette the uncultured American way, fingers outstretched, instead of with an insouciant, inward-turning grip of thumb and forefinger. He wanted to smoke, no matter how he had to hold the cigarette, but often there weren’t any. Not even the bitter Gauloises.

  Annette walked in front, and he followed, ten meters behind. If she stopped at a news kiosk to thumb through the magazines, he was supposed to keep going and saunter over to the other side of the street. When she resumed her walk, he could resume his. In this peculiar stagger, she managed outings for him. Away from the center of the city there were fewer German soldiers, more day-to-day lives—people waiting in lines for food, some seeking the extra morsels to feed a large American pilot hiding in the closet or a forbidden live duck kept in the b
athtub.

  His snapshot memories of the Paris streets: There was an air of normal city life. People managed to look fashionable, if slightly shabby. He remembered women in high hats or scarves wrapped on their heads or tied under the chin. They carried baskets and bags for the marketing. Now and then a frolicking child seemed to paint a dash of color on the drab urban canvas.

  AFTER SETTLING INTO a meager but sufficient single with floral walls and a television with a broken knob, Marshall went to visit Jim Donegan, a pilot he knew who lived in Paris. Jim, who had retired two years before, had urged Marshall to call whenever he was in Paris. He had married a Frenchwoman after divorcing his second wife. During the war Jim piloted a B-26 Marauder; he was in the first swarm on D-Day.

  Jim and Iphigénie lived in the Seventh Arrondissement, and Marshall decided to walk there. The day was warm, with a soft glow, fuzzy through the lush early-summer trees. The coffee had briskly reset his mental clock. He wanted to live on Paris time, and he thought beating jet lag was a matter of will. Denying his need for sleep, he set out from the hotel and detoured over to the Eiffel Tower, where he muddled through throngs of tourists.

  He always thought the tower was like something from The War of the Worlds, this gangly giraffe of an alien. He had been to the top only once, with one of the stewardesses, Melissa Littleton, during a long layover years ago, when he flew 707s. Where was she now? He never saw her again after their return flight to JFK. He couldn’t remember what else they did in Paris, or where they stayed.

  He quickly fled the wild hubbub beneath the tower.

  “MARSHALL, OUR CONDOLENCES on your wife,” Jim said.

  “Désolée,” said Iphigénie.

  “Your wife, a beautiful woman,” said Jim, hugging Marshall’s arm. “Much too young.”

  “Merci,” Marshall said, staring at the parquet floor. “It was merciful,” he said. “The suddenness. She didn’t have to suffer.” He hated saying that. He had said it so much it had begun to seem like the truth.

  Marshall was speaking French, in deference to Iphigénie, but she quickly switched to English. Jim, a couple of years older than Marshall, had a new paunch. Iphigénie, who worked in fashion design, was unsmiling, and she was dressed up in a chic outfit like someone about to go to a reception at the Hôtel Crillon.

  “Retirement is a whole different ball game, Marshall,” Jim said.

  “I can’t imagine it yet.” Marshall laughed. “I’m liable to hijack a jumbo—if I could find someplace to park it.”

  “I’d go with you, but Iffy wouldn’t let me.”

  Iphigénie caressed Jim’s cheek. “He calls me this questionable sobriquet—”

  “Only because I love you, ma chérie,” Jim said.

  Jim insisted on showing Marshall the view from the bathroom window—the head and shoulders of the Eiffel Tower.

  “The view from the bidet,” Iphigénie said with a wry smile when they returned.

  “I knew a bidet had to be good for something,” Marshall said.

  Jim laughed. “Last year some Americans rented the apartment next door for a few weeks, and they used their bidet to wash potatoes!”

  “That seems logical to me,” Marshall said.

  A memory hit him. He had washed his feet in the Vallons’ bidet in 1944.

  Later, as they were having coffee, Marshall told Jim and Iphigénie that he intended to follow the trail he took in 1944 and try to find some of the people who had helped him. He explained about the two families whose names he knew. “But the Vallons aren’t in the telephone book. I know where the Alberts lived, in Chauny, but of course they may be gone.”

  Iphigénie shuddered. “I would not want to go back to that time.”

  Jim said, “Iphigénie’s family had it rough during the war.”

  “It was nothing but pain, Marshall,” she said.

  Marshall thought he might soon regret this visit.

  Iphigénie said, “You won’t find anyone who will talk about the war.”

  “Wouldn’t people in the Resistance talk?”

  “They are not in the telephone book under ‘Résistance’!” she said dismissively.

  “But there were Resistance newspapers. Maybe the libraries—”

  “The true names wouldn’t be known,” she said. She pooched her lips out disdainfully. “They had code names.”

  She began removing the coffee cups. “People don’t talk about the war,” she repeated.

  JIM WALKED WITH Marshall toward the Métro. Marshall was getting tired. He apologized for having upset Iphigénie.

  Jim said, “She was a little girl during the Occupation. She was sent away to her grandparents’ house in the country, so she was separated from her parents.”

  They walked down the block, then paused by a news kiosk. Marshall said, “I always regretted that I didn’t get to fly on D-Day.”

  “The point is, Marshall, you were part of the whole thing. The big picture.”

  “And you?”

  “Well, that morning flying across the Channel never leaves me. And as we got near the beaches—it was wall-to-wall ships down there.”

  They walked on. At a street corner they waited for the light. Jim said, “I wouldn’t have missed it for anything. You know, I don’t think I could have done what those guys did, the ones who waded to the beach. Imagine. There’s a thousand Jerries with machine guns in bunkers, and the Army hands you a rifle and tells you to go on up that beach. I mean, God almighty.” He paused. “All I had to do was bomb a bridge. I could turn around and go home.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  Marshall and Jim crossed the street with the light and stopped on the corner.

  “What do you miss most about flying, Jim?”

  “God, everything.” Jim scratched his head and looked straight ahead.

  Marshall didn’t say anything.

  Instead of taking the Métro, he decided to walk. By the time he reached his room, he couldn’t resist a nap.

  JET LAG HIT HIM by surprise. With no airline schedule, he gave in to insomnia and naps. He was hungry at the wrong times. He had always been efficient about his job. He could see what was needed and block out the rest. But now everything had changed. Old, jobless, wifeless, in a foreign land. He felt suspended, as if on a permanent layover.

  For the next two days, as he walked through his fatigue, he tried to get his mind straight about what he was looking for. He wanted to find the Albert family in Chauny and the Vallon family in Paris. They might all be dead. Or retired to the Riviera. There were others, too, who had helped him along the way. But he had forgotten their names. Their false names, he corrected himself.

  ONE MORNING MARSHALL woke up on Paris time and felt sufficiently rested.

  “Lights. Action,” he told his reflection in the mirror as he shaved.

  After a coffee and some cornflakes in the petite breakfast room, he took the Métro to the Gare du Nord and boarded a train to Chauny. He remembered Gisèle Albert in an apron, wiping her hands, her son, Nicolas, tying a shoe.

  The train made several stops. He gazed out the window at fresh fields, villages, and intermittent stations. He saw a man on a mower, a woman with her apron full of something abundantly green gathered from her garden; a girl in a spotted kerchief on a bicycle.

  HE KNEW THE STREET name from Pierre Albert’s 1947 letter, and it didn’t take long to find that street. From the station it was a straight line, a turn, a dip down, a veering to the left.

  There it was. He knew the house. It was brick, the local style of brick laid in decorative crisscross patterns. There was less greenery now, more sidewalk and pavement, and the tall wooden fence in the back had been replaced with a low brick wall. The barn was gone. The room where he had been hidden was at the back of the house, with a window on the side. Now, from the street, he could see his window, with its overhang.

  He remembered bicycling from here to the train station the day he left for Paris.

  He was hesitating about go
ing to the front door when a couple with a dog passed by and glanced at him curiously. He started to move on. Then a small gray Renault pulled into the driveway. The driver emerged and headed for the house. He was carrying a yard-long baguette and a plastic grocery bag.

  “Nicolas?” Marshall said.

  The man turned. “Oui?”

  13.

  MARSHALL GAVE A LAST GLANCE AT THE NOSE ART BEFORE he ran for the woods. Dirty Lily would have to take care of herself. She was still on fire. Bob Hadley was panting, but Marshall didn’t dare slow down for him. “Come on, come on,” he whispered sharply, urging him into the woods. Marshall wore his leather sheep-lined helmet and his A-2 leather jacket, with his escape kit in a leg pocket. They had shucked their parachute rigging, but the catch on Hadley’s jammed and he had to cut himself loose.

  The woods were sparse on the edge, but dense deeper in. The terrain was brushy, with occasional large trees. Marshall scouted for climbing trees. He saw evergreens, a bank of them, and slowed down. When Hadley stopped to throw up, Marshall said the dogs would be after them.

  “What dogs?” Hadley said.

  “There will be dogs,” said Marshall. “And they like puke.”

  “Webb was dead, do you know? He was dead, I could tell.”

  “We’re not dead. Let’s go.”

  Marshall thought Hootie was dead, but he wasn’t sure about Webb. He knew Grainger’s shoulder had been hit and Campanello’s face was bloody. The Germans would be there soon, scavenging the mangled Fort like buzzards.

  The girl on the bicycle had disappeared. She had told him to wait while she went to find civilian clothing, but he had run into the woods. Their squadron mascot was patched onto Marshall’s leather jacket—Bugs Bunny placidly eating a carrot and resting his foot on a bomb. Only two days ago, Marshall had boasted that he was the Scourge of the Sky in brown leather. Now he was a marked target.