The Girl in the Blue Beret

by Bobbie Ann Mason

  “No. When you’re in a situation like that, you don’t pay attention to your body.”

  “Like opera singers,” she said. “I always wonder if they péter when they are singing. A good time to let go without being heard!”

  Laughing at her own crude wit, she went to a shelf and seized a wooden cigar box next to an arrangement of porcelain poodles.

  “This is what you came to see. I had to search for this, and I almost did not find it.” She opened the box and plucked from a pile of loose photographs a scallop-edged snapshot of a young man.

  “That’s him!” Marshall held the picture under a lamp. “I remember him. I knew your father! He was the agent connected to the family I stayed with.”

  “I never knew any of that,” she said. “But these photos are from that time.”

  Marshall studied Robert’s face—the small, sharp features, the dark, rough-cut hair. Robert stood on a road near a trimmed waist-high hedge. Beyond was a field, with no identifiable plants, a low cover crop of some kind. It seemed to be winter, judging by the young man’s coat—dark, heavy wool with a thick collar, perhaps of mouton. He was hatless, his abundant hair shining. A rucksack dangling from one hand appeared to be empty. The camera caught him in a slant profile, not facing the camera with an obligatory smile but deliberately posing as the serious revolutionary.

  Marshall wondered if Robert had been in the Maquis, the Resistance fighters who camped out in the wilds. Pierre and Nicolas had told him that young men often took to the Maquis to escape the obligatory work-service in Germany. Marshall studied the photograph, observing the country setting, with a shed or barn in the background. He recognized the young man, of course. He even recognized the coat. He strained to recall if there had been any signs of flirtation between Robert and Annette. No, not under her parents’ eye, he decided.

  “I owe him a great debt for helping me,” Marshall said now to Caroline, who sat down beside him, tucking her legs under her on the small divan.

  “He was a terrible man,” she said.

  “I find that so hard to believe.” Marshall told her what James Ford had said—what a fine person Robert Lebeau was, how he owed his life to this young man in the picture.

  She shrugged and dug in the box. There were more photos of him, with a crowd of siblings and his parents—a stocky, mustachioed dad and a squat, dark mother.

  “How do you happen to have these? You said he was terrible. Isn’t he still alive? Where can I find him?”

  She didn’t answer, and he wondered if she was going to cry.

  “Aren’t these the kind of pictures that would belong to his wife?” he asked quickly, to forestall the waterworks.

  Caroline shook her head slightly and said, “Maman told me that his wife wanted to know nothing about his past. She drew a line through it. Everything before her entry into his life was pfft!” She zipped up the past with a quick hand gesture.

  “So he gave them to your mother?”

  Caroline nodded. “Maman didn’t really want them either. She found it too painful to think what he used to be and what he became.”

  “What was that?” Marshall was confused. Was Lebeau a good man or not? What were his crimes? “Just a minute,” he said. “First, I have to know something. What was his wife’s name?”

  “Hortense. Why?”

  “What was your mother’s name?”

  “Emma Romain. That is my name. Romain. We never had his name. This is her photo.”

  Caroline’s mother had a high forehead, dark wings of thick hair, and a soft but careworn face. Marshall detected the resemblance to Caroline in the nose and the oval shape of the face.

  He was glad that Caroline excused herself then and began to rattle dishes in the kitchen. She wasn’t Annette’s daughter. Annette didn’t marry Robert. He was relieved, but he remained transfixed with the box of pictures. Robert Jules Lebeau, in all the early photos, was young and handsome, heartthrob enough for a wife and a mistress.

  The later photos of Robert—with Caroline’s mother and with their children—were few, mostly showing occasions at a dinner table. In some of the pictures he wore the traditional French workman’s blue smock. In one series of photos there were Christmas presents and a small tree on a table. The older Lebeau had a faded, sad aspect. His thick hair was swept back, revealing a high forehead. He sat at the table with the children, but he did not seem to be involved with them. He was not even looking at the camera.

  CAROLINE SERVED DINNER on a small table in a nook between the kitchen and the divan. The wine was light and dry, and Marshall enjoyed the food, the first home-cooked meal he had had in some time. Since lunch with the Alberts in Chauny, he remembered. Before that, he had no idea.

  “I recognize this potato from your store,” he kidded.

  “And you will the fruits too,” she said.

  By the time she brought out oranges and strawberries, he had told her everything he could think of about Cincinnati, Kentucky, and New Jersey, and he had become thoroughly informed about her wholesalers, orchard suppliers, and favorite customers—the guy with the tattoo of the Virgin, the old couple with the Great Dane who pulled them everywhere, the homosexual couple with a fondness for artichokes, the matron who offered frequent updates on her fibroid problem. Caroline rose to fetch a sharper knife for the fruit. Returning to the table, she brushed his arm with her hand, and he pressed his hand on hers, almost involuntarily, as if the gesture were a part of speech. But it was momentary.

  While she was clearing the table, he ducked into the bathroom, where he faced lingerie hanging on an ornate collapsible rack. Dainty things—placed there deliberately? The bidet looked like a good place to give a small dog a bath. He steadied himself by gazing at his hard, lined face in the mirror. His unblinking eyes.

  It pained him to remember how mechanical and inattentive sex had become with Loretta in the last couple of years of their marriage. He had, however, shared a few passionate nights with a flight attendant he saw on some of his London trips. She was a purser, somewhat older than most of the attendants. Her name was Penny, and she was planning to retire from the airline and start a florist’s shop. She took him to the Coventry flower market, where she bought flowers for her room—something she always did, she said—and she pressed a small white flower into the lapel buttonhole of his jacket. At Loretta’s funeral all the flowers made him remember Penny, and he wept.

  He had rationalized infidelities to Loretta by telling himself that his sporadic overseas flings were an alternate reality. He believed she would understand that. He could come home and enter into her world as if he had never been away. He was a false-hearted fool.

  He studied Caroline’s lingerie. He imagined slipping such garments off her youthful body.

  But the image was off-kilter. It would be like seducing a friend’s daughter, he thought. Robert Lebeau, the buoyant, active résistant. How could he have become the sad man in the photos, the bad father to Caroline?

  If Annette had not survived the war, she could not have become either Robert’s wife or his mistress, he thought.

  “CAN’T YOU STAY?” Caroline asked when he emerged and checked his watch. “I will make coffee.”

  “I have to get my beauty sleep,” he joked. “And I have to make some phone calls to the States.” A lie.

  “Don’t go yet,” she said.

  They sat on the divan with another glass of wine, and then the dog began whimpering.

  “Go away, Bobby. Wait.”

  The dog padded out of the room. But he quickly reappeared, whining insistently.

  “I must take Bobby out. He cannot hold himself long.” She eased into her flung-off sandals.

  “I’ll go with you,” he said. “I need to leave.”

  “Non, non, et non! Come with me and then we will return.”

  She fumbled with the leash, murmuring to the dog as if she was sharing intimate secrets. The sounds blurred—her key in the door, the jingle of the leash, her whispering to Bobby.r />
  Her walk was something of a prance, the self-aware gait of a woman who had a man’s attention. It was dark in the small park they passed. Marshall found himself praising Bobby’s absurd little merde production. Robert Jules Lebeau was going through his mind, flip-flopping images of hateful man and good man.

  “It’s too early for you to go home,” she said.

  “I’m an old man. I get tired,” he said.

  She touched his arm. “I would make you coffee.”

  “No. Thanks. Really.”

  “Are you bothered with me?” she asked as they turned down a broad street.

  “I’m sorry. I’m just finding it so hard to get the story about your father straight in my mind.”

  She didn’t reply for a moment.

  “He was not a father to me,” she said.

  “No.”

  “Let’s stop at this café,” she said, tugging his arm. The tables were not crowded, but on the sidewalk a woman with a stroller of twins in pink rolled by, almost nipping his foot. It seemed late to see babies being strolled.

  Marshall and Caroline sat at a sidewalk table in a splotch of neon light. They ordered two coffees. Her face seemed brittle in the glare. He thought he could see a trace of Robert in her features.

  She smiled up at him. “It is very nice here, no?”

  “Yes.”

  “Marshall, I realize I have been very mysterious on the subject of my father. I don’t think about him. He is not important.” She sighed. “But I will tell you what you want to know.”

  The coffee arrived. Marshall tested his, but he didn’t want it. He would never get to sleep. Caroline’s hands covered her face. The dog, in her lap, moaned and tried to wriggle between her hands, to lick her face.

  “There is such bitterness, monsieur,” she said to Marshall.

  “Not so formal,” he said. “I’m not an old man.”

  “You just said you were?”

  “I didn’t really mean it. I am an innocent in a foreign land.”

  “And you want to dig up the past.” Her eyes avoided his.

  “I apologize. I’ve been much too forward.” He tried to soothe her. He reached across the table, at the risk of being snapped at by Bobby. The light on Caroline’s face was harsh.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve troubled you. Drink your coffee, and we’ll talk another time.”

  Caroline sipped her café noir. She said, “No. Let me tell you about my father right now. Let us conclude this matter.”

  33.

  “IT WAS SO LAMENTABLE,” SHE SAID. WHEN SHE WAS YOUNG, HE was kind. He came every Wednesday evening, like a Father Christmas, bringing oranges or peaches or asparagus, something in season. He presented them as gifts, twisted in newspaper inside an old basket. He came in singing, and he petted each of the children, in turn, according to size. She was the middle child of the five, and as the family grew, his basket became larger. He drew amusing pictures for them. He taught them songs, for he was always singing, and he knew the children’s songs, the folk songs, the chansons, the religious songs. When they grew older he recited poetry—Verlaine, she remembered.

  When he sang “Dans le silence de la nuit,” he might have been a choir angel, the melody in his voice was so sweet. But he drank too much, and his behavior was unpredictable. Gradually, his visits became erratic and unpleasant. She couldn’t say when the change began. He gushed over the children and sloshed his wine on everything, including their heads. Late one evening when she was about ten, he arrived very drunk. The younger children were in bed, and she was reading. He entered her mother’s bedroom. She heard shouting and crying. She was used to their loud noises, but this was different. Her mother was crying, and Caroline could make out some of the words. Her mother was insisting that he couldn’t do something or other, pleading. “No, no, no,” she said. Caroline’s young mind trembled in fear of her father, who had sung the chansons so sweetly.

  She heard her mother say, “I beg you, tell me how I can live with this.”

  “You have nothing to do with it!” he cried in a high voice.

  “You cannot go on like this.”

  “This is the way I am.”

  “No, it does not have to be.”

  Caroline went to comfort her two little brothers, who had awakened. The cuckoo clock on the wall had not worked in years, but suddenly, as the voices in the bedroom grew louder, the cuckoo strutted out of its hole and gave two loud cuckoos, as if to say “Chut!” Shut up.

  Caroline believed the cuckoo was an omen. As her parents continued to argue, she could bear no more, and she burst into her mother’s bedroom. Her father stood there, on one side of the bed, with her mother on the other, against the wall. They were fully dressed, and when she entered, their faces dropped, their voices lowered, and her father said, “Hello, my little artichoke.”

  “Yes, did you say your prayers?” her mother said.

  Her father patted her on the head, waved goodbye to her mother, and left the apartment.

  After that night, he came less often. Then his visits stopped altogether. On Wednesdays the boys asked where the basket of surprises was. It was a long time before they discovered that their mother had been going to visit Robert in the hospital. She would not take the children to see him. His wife and their children visited him on Sundays, and Caroline’s mother visited on Saturday afternoons. Caroline heard later that it was a psychiatric hospital, where he had shock treatments to dull his skewered mind, but her mother would not confirm this rumor. After he was released, she managed to keep him away from the children. There was a calmness around the apartment then.

  A year later, Caroline was in the apartment one evening with her two little brothers when her father appeared, drunk. He was haggard, mumbling, apologizing for coming without a surprise basket.

  “Where is your mother?”

  “She’s at the shop.”

  “She was expecting me.”

  His hands were trembling. He was agitated. He found some wine and poured himself a glass.

  “Let me teach you a song I learned.”

  Caroline didn’t understand all the words, but in the school yard she had heard something naughty about a woman’s belle chose, and he was singing this to her. She remembered him grinning as he sang, enjoying the trick he was playing on her innocence. She refused to learn the song.

  “The cuckoo clock—did it ever talk again?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “It needed to speak only once. To warn us, to inform us what was going on.”

  “What was going on, my petite?”

  She prayed for her mother to arrive. Her father, once handsome but now overweight and worn, stood before her with something glinting in his eye that made her afraid. She resolved to shield the two younger ones from this man.

  Marshall reached to touch Caroline’s arm, but she didn’t respond to his gesture. She kept talking, as if she had to empty a vessel.

  “I don’t know where he is. He went away after my mother died, a few years ago. I felt she died from the strain—not a legitimate wife, all those children, his drunkenness. I think she loved him, but he wouldn’t marry her and she always felt cast aside. So after my mother died, there was no connection, and I did not need to see him again.”

  She no longer acknowledged her father, she said, and she had not wanted to answer Marshall’s questions about him.

  “How did you and your brothers and sisters support yourselves?” Marshall asked. He rubbed his eyes, as if that would help.

  “We had the shop, and my brothers had work. But we did not exist for his family. We do not have his name.”

  “How do you have the grocery?”

  “He gave the épicerie to my mother long before. She made it a beautiful place.”

  “Your father wasn’t all bad, if he gave her the store.”

  “I recall the terrible times.”

  Caroline turned her head aside, then bent over the dog and stroked him.

  “I’m sorry,
” Marshall said.

  Then, for a while they sat together silently. Marshall tried to sort out what he had heard. Robert had spiraled downward—but why? In 1944 he had seemed so capable. What had he seen and done after Marshall knew him?

  “The war …,” he said. But then he could find no more words. He wasn’t sure what he wanted to say.

  ON THE WALK to the Métro, he felt empty and hard-hearted. Caroline hadn’t insisted that he stay, but she seemed disappointed. She had grown up in a divided home, not an easy thing. When they had said goodbye, with a quick double peck, he wasn’t sure he would see her again. She gave him a small, wan wave as he left her door and turned toward the stairs.

  He waited at a crosswalk for the light to change. Ahead, the neon green cross of the pharmacy was blinking, as if wounded.

  The train was due in two minutes, and riders were gathering on the platform, many dressed for late-night shifts. Marshall sat on a bench, his mind dulled. The train arrived, disgorging a motley batch of people. Marshall slipped wearily into a vacant window seat, and as the train twisted through the deep tunnel he gazed through the glass at dark, grimy tiles and thick, snaky wires.

  34.

  “I HAVE FOUND ANNETTE VALLON,” NICOLAS SAID ON THE TELEPHONE.

  Marshall, jangled awake by the ringing, became entangled in the cord and dropped the receiver. He fumbled to restore the connection but had to wait for Nicolas to call back. Marshall had slept late again—insomnia lasting till dawn—and had been dreaming of cranes migrating, their necks stuck out straight like jet fuselages.

  Robert must be dead, Marshall had decided. If his body was still alive, his spirit was gone. Marshall was sure Caroline had told him the truth. And he was repelled by the thought of pursuing the broken wreck of the gallant young man he had known, if only fleetingly. Marshall knew he was overreacting, but the wave of revulsion was overwhelming. It was pointless, perhaps even perverse, to keep hunting for people he had known long ago, in a wholly different world. He should stop, pack up, go home. Home?