The Girl in the Blue Beret

by Bobbie Ann Mason

  He heard shouts in the street. He heard a horse clopping along, dragging a cart of some sort. Through the tiny window he could see an arc of the street and a wedge of open field. He could see the traffic pass. Occasionally he saw a group of children walking by. Their spontaneous giggles and laughter charged him with a bit of hope.

  IN THE EVENING the women closed the shutters and drew the dark drapes to conceal the candlelight of the kitchen. He was brought downstairs to share a rabbit stew with the eight family members—the four older women, two young girls, and their parents. Reticent, Marshall observed them. His knowledge of French collapsed under the rush of their conversation. He learned to interpret tones if not their run-together words. He saw their skeptical looks, the gestures they made over their food. He could tell when they were talking about the Germans. The Germans apparently took the family’s goose for their Christmas. The Germans gorged on chocolate! Chickens! Butter!

  The women in black had an authority that made the girls and their mother cower. There were no young men. The women barely spoke to Marshall, but when he tried to draw them out with his makeshift vocabulary, they modestly but eagerly queried him about America.

  “FDR? Connaissez-vous FDR?”

  “Shirley Temple?”

  No one in the family revealed their names except for the man, Reynard. He was short and slender, with knobby hands. He pulled a leather wallet from his pocket and showed Marshall his identity papers. He pointed to his photograph, his name, his occupation, his citizenship. He flipped through the papers quickly.

  “À Paris,” Reynard said. “In Paris you will obtain the fausse carte d’identité.”

  “À Paris,” they all said, nodding in assent.

  They were saying he would need a false ID card.

  Every evening he heard German soldiers marching through the village on night patrol, singing a mournful song that sounded like homesickness itself. Warmth from the evening fire drifted up the open stairway door to his garret. He crept out and sat on the stair.

  Sometimes he heard the Luftwaffe overhead, a nasty roar that he could feel in the pit of his stomach.

  At night the face in the cockpit of a Focke-Wulf 190 visited him, a fighter pilot who had suddenly, briefly, flown alongside the stricken Dirty Lily. Their planes were so close, like cars on a street.

  He replayed his mission, instant by instant. He didn’t want to forget it, but neither did he want to relive its most terrible moments. He was heartsick; he didn’t know the fate of the crew. They had lost the plane.

  He had been in England kissing Nurse Begley, and suddenly here he was in a claustrophobic hidey-hole, waiting, waiting, in a house of strangers jabbering gibberish, women in shapeless black garments plodding through their days worrying with food, fragments of food, roots from a cellar. He was a helpless pipsqueak. When he went down to empty his chamber pot one morning, he saw the girls’ mother come in from the garden with a green leaf. She waved it in his face and chattered excitedly.

  France didn’t seem as cold as New Jersey, from what he could gauge by the quality of the unheated air, the chill in the house.

  He heard voices downstairs during the night, and footsteps ascending the stairs. “Monsieur, monsieur, des Américains! Américains! Aviateurs!”

  He opened the door and there stood two men—disheveled, large, haggard, sleepy-looking.

  “Des aviateurs!” one of the women in black—the tallest—said. She was carrying a small candle.

  “We were shot down,” the taller one said sheepishly.

  “You suis américain too?” Marshall asked, startled.

  “Yeah boy!” said the other. “I’ve been on the run, like a wild pig rooting around in the woods. Four days. Then I met some friendly guys who took me to a farmhouse and I got grub, and next thing you know I met Pete and they brought us both here.”

  “Pete Drummond, 403rd,” the tall one said. “Waist gunner. Our Fort got hit on the way back from Frankfurt, and I bailed out. Let me tell you, that was some ride.”

  The woman left, and for a time the flyers filled the room with their stories. Marshall was glad to hear English. Probably one of these flyers was from the Fort he had heard flying low a few days earlier. The guys gabbed until another of the women climbed up to their hideaway.

  “Chut!” she said, entering the room with a tray. “Hush.”

  She had brought them each a cup of ale and some pieces of bread.

  “Man, this cock-sucker French bread is liable to tear out all my fillings,” said Pete.

  The other flyer, Nelson Avery, a tail gunner from the 305th, gnawed his bread steadily. “Excuse me, I’m still starving.” He licked the crumbs from his hand. “I don’t know what happened to our plane, our crew. I got out, but it was on fire and I reckon they’re all goners.”

  He spoke as if he were talking about a distant event that did not concern himself. His emotions hadn’t registered yet, Marshall thought. Nor had his own. He didn’t know where he was or what he was supposed to feel. It was some small comfort to have two more flyers there with a language in common, but they also intruded on what had been his private garret.

  “Where’s your flight suit?” he asked Pete, who was dressed like a laborer.

  “I robbed a scarecrow.”

  The pants were filthy and ragged, too short, and the sleeves of the jacket rode up his arms, exposing his GI wristwatch.

  Marshall joked, “Next time, I’m going to pack a sandwich and a French peasant outfit.”

  “Always be prepared, huh?” said Nelson. “Well, the Boy Scouts don’t teach you how to bail out of a blazing bomber.”

  “I got the piss knocked out of me when I landed,” Pete said. “When you hit the silk there are two big spurts. First, you’re out the door, WHOOM! Then WHAM! The chute opens. Then you’re falling, like your ears have gone deaf. Or you’re in heaven. Then WHAM-BAM! You hit the ground.”

  “It’s so peaceful till you hit,” Nelson said.

  Hearing about their flakked and burning bombers and their heavenly parachute descents intrigued Marshall. He almost envied them. They could just float down to the ground, and then they were on their own. They didn’t have to see their crewmates lying dead. He shivered. The Dirty Lily slammed into the ground again.

  “What do you think comes next?” Nelson asked Marshall. “Is the Underground going to get us out?”

  “You never know who might be friendly or not,” said Pete. “I tried to ask a man on a bicycle for directions, and he just kept going. He muttered some frog grunt I couldn’t understand, but you could tell he didn’t want to be bothered.”

  “They’re afraid,” Marshall said. He sipped his ale, trying to make it last.

  “But this family is going to help us.”

  “How long have you been here?”

  “Three days. Every day they say I’m going.”

  “I think the invasion is coming any day,” Nelson said. “I kept hearing that on base.”

  A step on the stairs. The signal Marshall had learned, the chut! sound and Allo Allo.

  The woman had brought two blankets. Pete thanked her. “Merci,” he knew to say.

  “Mercy bucketsful,” said Nelson, grinning as he took the blankets.

  Marshall understood from the woman’s gestures that Pete and Nelson would have to sleep in the hiding closet, to stay concealed. He helped her move the chest away from the small door. There was some bedding inside.

  “Both of us, in there?” Pete said. He and Nelson laughed.

  Marshall tried to make them understand the seriousness of the house rules.

  “Not a sound,” he said.

  “I hope I don’t fart,” Pete said, with a glance at the woman. “She doesn’t understand fart, does she?”

  “She’ll know it when she hears it,” Marshall said angrily. “And so will the Germans if they show up here. So knock it off.”

  “O.K., O.K.”

  “Seriously. No laughing. No snoring. Nothing.”

&nb
sp; The woman stayed. She straightened the photograph on the wall.

  “That’s her son,” Marshall explained. “This was his room. He was sent off to a work camp in Germany.”

  Pete and Nelson made sheepish noises then, and Marshall was glad he had caused them discomfort. He was feeling like a veteran at evasion.

  “She wants our cups,” he said.

  After the woman left, he reiterated all the cautions. “These folks are laying their lives on the line for us,” he said.

  Marshall offered his bed, but the other two would not take it. “We’ll take turns on it if we’re here very long,” he said. “I hope we get out of here in a day or two so we can go get a forged ID. I don’t know who I am anymore.”

  His attempt to joke fell flat.

  HE LAY ON THE SMALL BED thinking about Webb and Hootie. Hadley was a fool, maybe a POW by now. Chick Cochran, the right waist gunner, had bailed out. Or had he? Hadley said he did. Maybe Chick was in the wreckage. Where were Grainger, Redburn, and Campanello now? They couldn’t have gone far with their wounds. They could be hiding and getting treatment, but if they had to go to the hospital, they might have had no chance at escaping. He knew Ford and Stewart had headed for the woods, in a different direction from Marshall and Hadley. He counted nine. And Marshall made ten.

  14.

  “NICOLAS! NICOLAS ALBERT?”

  “Oui.” The man with the baguette turned toward Marshall. “Américain?”

  “Oui. I was here in the war.”

  “Un aviateur américain! American flyer!” Nicolas banged on the door.

  Marshall’s sudden reunion with Pierre and Gisèle Albert and their son, Nicolas, made him think of a boisterous litter of puppies waking up from a nap. Yes, Marshall was going well. How was Pierre going? How was Gisèle going? They were going well. Nicolas too. Marshall’s French was going excellently.

  The twelve-year-old boy was recognizable in Nicolas the man. Marshall remembered him eagerly bringing in daily reports of the aircraft he had spotted, the whereabouts of Germans in the streets, activities he had seen around the train station or the post office or the school. The Germans had requisitioned his school, occupying one half of it and crowding the boys into the other. Marshall recalled that Nicolas had been earnest and intelligent, full of questions about America.

  “Do you still have your American maps?” Marshall asked him now.

  “You remember? Bien sûr. I have a weakness for geography, but I have not yet traveled to your country.”

  Nicolas was a school superintendent, and he often had lunch with his parents. He and his wife lived in a suburb of Chauny, and their two daughters were attending a university in Nancy. Gisèle insisted that Marshall join them for the meal. There was plenty, she insisted. She was tiny, with a narrow forehead, bushy eyebrows, and strong hands. Pierre had thinning hair, a thick neck, nostril hair, and an occasional boom in his voice. He was perhaps a decade older than Marshall, but his grooved face seemed hardly older now than it had in 1944. He assured Marshall that the clothing he had asked for long ago had arrived. Marshall thought Loretta must have sent it, but he didn’t say this. Gisèle told him they had kept in touch with many of the aviators they had sheltered during the war.

  “I’m not much of a correspondent,” Marshall said, explaining that his failure to answer Pierre’s letter was a faux pas that jumped over the years.

  “C’est la vie. Nevertheless, it gives us great pleasure to host you in our country again. Gisèle, get the Calvados.”

  Pierre poured the aperitifs. He raised his glass. “A toast to your son, le petit Albert, and to your return to your friends in France.”

  “You remember.” The phrase le petit Albert was still fresh in Marshall’s mind from rereading Pierre’s old letter.

  “That gave us such joy when you wrote of your marriage and your son. Do you give the French pronunciation—no, of course you do not.”

  “They don’t speak much French in New Jersey,” Marshall said. “And I’m afraid Albert is not much interested in the meaning of his name—or in the war.”

  “Ah, the young. Give him time.”

  “It is the greatest honor to us that you give him our name,” said Gisèle, who began gathering dishes from a cupboard. “Don’t derange yourself. You know that I don’t accept help in my kitchen.”

  Marshall hadn’t thought of offering help, then was sorry that he hadn’t, then relaxed, knowing any exertion would have been inappropriate.

  Gisèle laid out dishes on an old wooden table that was sticky with sugar crumbs and spills. “We have a simple lunch,” she said. “But Nicolas demands his favorites.”

  “Maman is the best cook in France.”

  “Angeline is a superior cook!”

  “My wife,” Nicolas said to Marshall.

  In a while, Pierre uncorked a bottle of red wine, and Gisèle served slices of a vegetable terrine adorned with bits of radish. As they ate, Marshall told them about his life after the war.

  “I’ve had a cushy life,” Marshall said. “Cushy—facile, luxueuse? The worst thing that ever happened to me was crash-landing the B-17.” Immediately, he thought perhaps he should have said the loss of his wife.

  “Marshall, you were very frightened when you came here!” said Gisèle. “You were so disturbed about your airplane and your friends.”

  “You flew the grand airplanes,” said Nicolas. “In the war and after too!”

  “I wish I could have flown more missions,” Marshall said. “I really regret that.”

  “Everyone has his part, Marshall,” Pierre said, finishing a tidbit of toast.

  Gisèle cleared the plates and served a heavy stew, with the baguette.

  “It’s a feast,” Marshall said.

  “This is no longer wartime, dear Marshall!” said Gisèle, spooning stew from the bulbous tureen into a dish for him. “There is much food now.”

  “People forget the deprivation,” said Pierre. “Marshall, you know that after war there is a grand forgetting.”

  “That is normal,” said Gisèle.

  “But now the people of our country have forgotten too long.” Pierre poured wine and recorked the bottle.

  “All of France has amnesia,” Gisèle said, gazing out the window.

  “It has to be finished,” Pierre said. “Oh, you know France has had a terrible history. Terrible.”

  “The collabos know who they are,” said Gisèle bitterly.

  Pierre said, “Too many of those—but they have to live with their shame.”

  “You made a tarte Tatin, didn’t you, Maman?” asked Nicolas.

  “Bien sûr.” She nodded. “I have beautiful apples,” she said to Marshall. “Remember the apples we ate in 1944?”

  “Yes, I believe I do.”

  “We had few apples, and we had to make use of every small part.” Gisèle wrinkled her brows.

  “You were generous with me,” Marshall said, the warmth of the wine easing him.

  Pierre shrugged and tore another piece of baguette. He said, “When the fleets of the B-17s went over, with the streaming rows of cloud like breaths on a cold morning, we rejoiced. We loved the sound. When we heard the bombs drop on the munitions factories and the aerodrome at Laon, we knew there was danger for us, but there was more danger if nothing was done.”

  Nicolas said, “It was very exciting to see the planes, and to hear the roar of them filling the sky. We were always watching for parachutists.”

  “Nicolas saw a parachutist die,” Gisèle said.

  “An American? Did one of our bombers crash around here?” Marshall stiffened.

  “It was a man from a B-24, the Liberator, which fell somewhere to the east,” Nicolas explained. “We were outside at school, at the time of the recess, and we heard the noise of the plane high above, but we could not see it. Then we saw the man in the harness, floating down so peacefully, below a canopy. We began running. He was not far away. Then as he floated down we saw a German soldier on the bridge shoot hi
m. We could see the man’s body jerking. He dropped behind a dairy near my school. Naturally we ran toward him. We had our little pocket knives—my friends and I had them for cutting parachutes! And now there really was an aviateur coming from the sky. He was not far from the school, maybe half a kilometer. Other people were running, and they told us to go back, stay away. Of course I was a boy and I wanted to be involved. There may have been six of us boys, all running. And the aviateur was shrouded in his parachute. People began tearing it away, quickly, cutting the lines, and I could see him lying there, bloody and lifeless. I remembered all the aviateurs we had harbored in our house, men who had parachuted or who had survived crash landings—like you, Marshall—and I was very disturbed, because I realized that this young man would have a family, maybe a girlfriend, probably dear parents who were worried about him and who would grieve. I knew that the Germans would bury him in a way that if the man’s parents knew, they would be mortified. Oh, the thoughts I took with me as we hurried back from recess to our classroom, where we must sit perfectly still all afternoon and recite pluperfect verbs!”

  No one spoke as Gisèle cleared the dishes.

  “I was lucky,” Marshall said then. “Without you, what would I have done? Out on my own, I would have been dragged to a stalag very soon.”

  Pierre raised his glass. “To friends from two countries, to the friendship of two countries.”

  “The same for me,” Marshall said, not finding the right words. His voice choked.

  “La tarte Tatin—voilà!” said Gisèle, setting the dessert on the table.

  “Merci, Maman,” Nicolas said.

  The apple tart was so delicious that everyone fell silent. After it was finished, Gisèle removed the plates and served coffee.

  “This is real coffee!” she said. “It is good, is it not?”

  Marshall laughed. “I remember the wartime coffee! What was it—mud and sticks? What was the secret?”

  “An exclusive ingredient from Germany,” she said, touching his arm gently.

  Marshall nodded. “It was a hard time.”

  “Yes, very difficult,” Gisèle said, trading glances with Pierre.