The Girl in the Blue Beret

by Bobbie Ann Mason

  He closed the windows halfway, and the rain splashed against them while he read his mail. Al Grainger had written again, suggesting a crew reunion at the crash site in Belgium. “It was my wife’s idea, and I have to say she was right on target. After what you wrote about going back there and meeting those people, it just seems right to go and thank them in a proper way. And we could have a great time seeing each other, catching up, reminiscing. Couldn’t we round up all the surviving crew? Their families could come too.”

  O.K., but no preaching, Marshall felt like replying. He tended to answer letters in his head instead of on paper. Marshall the Procrastinator. Thirty-six years.

  After the rain let up, he telephoned Nicolas and reported on his trip.

  “Marshall, maybe I have found the house where you stayed before we sheltered you in Chauny.”

  “The women in black?”

  “Yes. I don’t know if any are alive, but there is a daughter.”

  “Good work, Nicolas.”

  Marshall thanked him and agreed to come to Chauny for Sunday lunch after he returned from his hike with Annette.

  Later, he telephoned Mary and found himself confiding that he had located an “interesting” woman who had been a girl when he came through during the war.

  “Her family took care of me when I passed through Paris back then,” he told his daughter. “Now I’ve looked her up, and we had a good time reminiscing.”

  He couldn’t continue. He was thinking of Loretta. “A good time” perhaps wasn’t the right phrase.

  “Dad, it’s O.K. if you have some women friends.”

  “Thank you. Your old dad is still alive and kicking.”

  “That reminds me—I heard that Albert has a girlfriend! I was blown away. Don’t tell him I told you.”

  “That’s good news,” Marshall said. “I always thought it would just take time. Maybe this one will work out.”

  “That’s what I thought,” said Mary, with only the slightest hesitation in her voice.

  “How about you, Mary?”

  “I’ve been going out with a guy at the college—an economist. He’s really interesting, and he has some theories about inflation that baffle me.”

  “Well, let me know if you find out what causes it. How about this—I’m planning to go hiking, and I’m going to buy hiking boots tomorrow.”

  “Well, far out, Dad!”

  “I guess so. But it was never my ambition to become an old fuddy-duddy, you know. I can still get around.”

  She laughed. “Remember how you and Mom would take us for picnics at a state park when we were kids? Nobody thought of going hiking in those days, but I’ve gotten more interested in fitness. Everybody has. Maybe we can go to a park again sometime. We could go hiking this time.”

  “Well, let’s do that,” Marshall said. “I’ll have the boots for it, anyway!”

  MARSHALL, COMFORTABLE IN PARIS NOW, no longer carried his cash in a safety pouch on his leg. He gazed at the window display at the Everything Store: fishhooks, a cheese grater, a doll made of seashells, and a Hemingway novel with a faded cover.

  “Bonjour, monsieur l’Américain! Ça va?”

  “Je vais bien, merci. And you, Guy?”

  “Comme-ci, comme-ça. How does your search go?”

  “Ah, Guy, I’ve found her. I was looking in the wrong place. She was in the Charentes!” Briefly, he told of his visit with Annette and the hike they planned together.

  “A rendez-vous for a randonnée,” Guy said, smiling.

  “Exactly so!” Marshall fingered some leather bags hanging from the wall. “I’m looking for a backpack, a small one for hiking.”

  Guy produced a leather rucksack that resembled something a mountain climber of the nineteenth century would carry. The French farmers in 1944 carried such rucksacks, slung over their shoulders. Robert Lebeau had one. Marshall had one himself, holding his meager supplies on the train out of Paris.

  “I’d prefer something more modern, Guy.”

  “More American, you want to say.”

  Guy revealed a cheap blue zippered pack that seemed suitable. Marshall paid and made small talk about his trip to the Charentes. Then he remembered that he needed a curtain of some kind to keep out the streetlights. For some time he examined the crop of dusty bamboo blinds that Guy offered. They had been kept for perhaps decades behind a rolled-up Turkish carpet.

  “They look ancient,” Marshall said.

  “Mais oui.” Guy began rummaging excitedly through some cabinets in the back of the store. He went back and forth searching. Then he found what he was looking for, a roll of dark fabric.

  “This was to line the curtains, to shut out the light. I am surprised myself to find this. Maybe it is left from the wartime, because people couldn’t afford to buy it.”

  “Exactly what I want.”

  “You will keep the light inside at night, Marshall. And in the day the sun will stay away.”

  Marshall flicked dust from the black roll. “I hope you’re not charging antique prices.”

  Guy shrugged. “For you, just what it’s worth.”

  “I’ll try it,” Marshall said. He paid for his purchase, declining to have it wrapped. Laboriously, Guy wrote out a detailed receipt.

  “See you next time, Guy. Where do you take your vacation?”

  “I go to the Languedoc in August.” Guy shut his cash drawer and straightened some knickknacks on the counter. “My wife likes breathing in the country. That’s what she says—in the country she can breathe. My two sons and daughter and my parents and my wife’s mother and my grandmother come. My brother comes with his family. We’re all there. Bien sûr, there is nothing like having all the family together. We do the picnics, the games. It is bliss!”

  Guy’s broad smile made Marshall wistful. He thought of the family picnics Mary had mentioned. The elaborate logistics of the outings had always annoyed him, smothering whatever “bliss” he might have felt.

  Walking down the avenue du Général Leclerc, he thought how unlike a Frenchman he was, with his inadequate attention to things that mattered most here—food and wine and family. History, they didn’t dwell on. Sex—well, maybe he could see eye-to-eye with the French on that.

  The blackout curtain material was brittle on the edges, but he trimmed it and taped it to the windows. He wasn’t sure it was authentic, but it would do. That night he slept peacefully, and the morning sun was high before he was fully awake.

  39.

  ANNETTE HAD GIVEN HIM EXPLICIT DIRECTIONS TO THE VARIOUS places where she had guided the aviators, and now in his new hiking boots, he set off to find them. First, he went to Saint-Mandé to see where the Vallons had lived. He had been entirely wrong about the location. The building, made of handsome pale stone blocks, seemed less familiar than the one he had found on his recent walk. Yet there was a vaguely recognizable outline and shape to the neighborhood. Standing across the street, he let himself turn back in time. The entry. The bicycles. The stairs. He identified the window of the room where he had slept, facing the small side street. He remembered waiting hours alone, trying to keep warm by doing jumping jacks—in his socks. The window on the corner was the sitting room, which had a large ornate stove that burned coal, delivered through a chute to the basement. He spotted the chute now. Annette, Monique, and their parents had slept in two rooms on the other side of the sitting room, and when there were additional airmen visiting, the girls moved into their parents’ room. On the street, staring up at the dining room window, he remembered the kitchen beyond it, where Mme Vallon miraculously concocted splendid meals from meager rations. He remembered the goose, the feathers flying.

  After studying the building for a while, he had readjusted his memory. It seemed odd to him that memory was so malleable, that what he had thought was true could be revised, like a flight plan.

  To break in his hiking boots, he walked toward the Jardin des Plantes, keeping up a good stride along the Seine, passing a variety of scenes—fishermen
, industries, laundry. The weather was good, not too hot. The long botanical garden stretched out in front of the Museum of Natural History.

  “Go straight past the garden to the grove of Christmas trees,” she had told him just two days earlier.

  He passed the statue, Rodin’s Thinker. The guy was still thinking. Marshall recognized the general layout and the area where among the evergreens she had assembled airmen before sending them across the street to the Gare d’Austerlitz. He wandered around through the trees. The path meandered. On a bench by some bushes, an aged man sat reading Le Monde. Marshall sat on another bench to tighten his bootlace. He dimly recalled that Annette had escorted him and a B-17 waist gunner to some benches amidst public shrubbery. Later, she had distributed their train tickets surreptitiously, without speaking. The last time Marshall saw her, she was hurrying away down the broad avenue of plane trees. He had thought he remembered how the sunshine dappled teasingly through the great trees lining the promenades. It was spring. But now he realized he must have been here near dusk. He had taken the night train to Toulouse.

  The Gare d’Austerlitz was across the street from the Jardin des Plantes. Marshall made his way there, passing the Métro stairs and entering the massive building. The high glass-and-wrought-iron ceiling was so distinctive that he did not see how he could have forgotten the station. He could almost locate in his spatial memory the exact quai where he had boarded the train. Robert had entered the car without glancing at him. So many memories were crashing through Marshall’s head that reliving them made him exultant—the fear then, the relief now.

  On the way out of the station, he remembered what Nicolas had said about the Gare d’Austerlitz. The Jews were deported from this spot. Marshall was glad the Dirty Lily had dropped at least a few bombs. If he hadn’t been shot down, maybe he could have helped shorten the war. If, if only. You couldn’t revise history with conditional clauses.

  He pictured the blithe young man he had been—reckless but scared, overconfident, out of his element, filled with longings, strangely detached from home, walking tentatively in a foreign country. He reflected upon his youthful brazenness, his naïveté. He wondered if Annette found her youth embarrassing too. Maybe the primary difference between youth and adulthood was the capacity for embarrassment.

  40.

  HIS BOOTS GAVE HIM BLISTERS, BUT THE LEATHER WAS GROWING more pliable, and after five days of exploring the city, he considered the boots broken in, ready for action. Everywhere he went he thought about Annette, wanting to see her again, looking forward to seeing her mother again sometime in the future. He missed M. Vallon. Annette had said he had a weak heart.

  The week passed quickly. One night he dined with Jim and Iphigénie, who were back from the Dordogne and already planning an August retreat in Switzerland. They sat at a small table on the sidewalk, jammed between two other tables. Marshall was all elbows, and the pedestrians crowding past annoyed him. Jim, however, seemed habituated to Parisian life, charmed by the way Iphigénie constructed an area of privacy around their small table, although they sat precariously perched on the edge of traffic. This was Paris. Marshall gave in. He let the wine stoke up his little glow—the miniature furnace of desire and hope that was burning inside him. His pilot light, he thought ridiculously.

  “The Swiss go to Provence in the summer,” Iphigénie said. “But I prefer Switzerland. It’s peaceful. Paris gets too hot.”

  “I’d like to go to Tenerife,” said Jim. “I flew there a few times.”

  “I would go to Morocco, to Algiers,” said Iphigénie. “I adore the scarves, the jewelry. But I must wait for that.”

  “Iffy’s working on a new line of clothes,” Jim explained. “I tried to get her to call it ‘Iffy.’ She’s full of brilliant ideas.”

  “The young people dress despicably,” she said. “There is no respect, no style.”

  “You are right,” said Marshall.

  They listened attentively as Marshall recounted his success finding the girl in the blue beret, and Iphigénie smiled.

  “You must take her a beautiful gift, Marshall. I will help you select.”

  “I met another woman too.” He told about meeting Odile.

  “How does she expect me to find those guys she helped?” he said. Then he heard how ungracious he sounded.

  “She seemed desperate?” Iphigénie asked.

  “She made a great sacrifice,” Marshall said. “For a couple of fool Americans like me.” Absently, he let the waiter refill his wineglass.

  “Those guys should have written her,” Jim said.

  Iphigénie touched Jim’s cheek. “What would you have done, mon chéri?”

  Later, after Iphigénie went home, Jim and Marshall stopped for a drink at a bar on Jim’s street. Jim had insisted.

  “Marshall, I wanted to tell you something I learned. One of Iffy’s cousins told me this at the wedding. I don’t know why. It was hardly a topic for a wedding day. There was a little village not far from Iffy’s family’s house. In 1944, just a few days after D-Day, the Germans decided to destroy this village—out of sheer cussedness, I guess. It was Hitler’s scorched-earth policy. They were in retreat, but as a farewell gesture, they rounded up everybody there and massacred them—in the church! Babies and all. Little kids. They machine-gunned them, then set fire to the place and set off explosions in two or three other places. Over six hundred people got killed. The whole town.”

  “The whole town?” Marshall turned to face Jim straight on.

  “How can anybody to this day understand that?” Jim said.

  Marshall lifted his drink halfway. “The woman with the parachutists said the German officer was very correct. That’s something I’ve heard often. They were so correct. It meant they were precise. But barbarians also. It makes no sense.”

  “Here’s what I wanted to tell you, Marshall. One of Iffy’s aunts lived in that village. She had married a shoemaker, and they lived on the main street. Iphigénie has never told me about them. It was her cousin, a serious kind of guy, has a pharmacy or something in Limoges, who told me about it. He seemed hung up on it. He said that de Gaulle decided to leave the village exactly the way it was, a ghost town. This guy said you could go there and see where Iffy’s uncle’s cobbler shop was, and that the man’s sewing machine, the one he stitched the shoes with, was still standing there, all rusty and forlorn-looking. That gave me the willies, just hearing about it.” Jim paused and sipped his Scotch. “Good old Iffy. She’s been through more than I gave her credit for at first.”

  Jim drained his Scotch and surveyed the room. Marshall stared toward the mirror behind the zinc bar at the reflection of a young waiter with a tray of drinks. Marshall could not see himself in the mirror.

  “I’ll get this, Jim,” he said, reaching for his wad of franc notes.

  41.

  MARSHALL PLANNED TO RETURN TO ANGOULÊME AFTER THE weekend. On Thursday night he received a telephone call from Sonia Ford. Her father had died. She wanted to thank Marshall for the call he had made. It meant a lot, she said.

  “Would you let the other crew members know?” she asked. “I don’t think I can locate them all.”

  “Leave it to me,” Marshall said.

  AL GRAINGER ANSWERED on the second ring, and Marshall told him the news.

  “Heavens to Betsy,” Al said. “I didn’t even know he was sick.”

  “We should have had a poop sheet for the crew. Loretta used to send out stuff and keep everybody in touch.”

  “It was Ford’s time,” Al said. “It’s the Lord’s will.”

  “I spoke to Ford last week. I had no idea he was that far gone.”

  They shared a few memories.

  Marshall said, “I was wondering if you could make a couple of calls there in the States to let the others know, to spread the word.”

  “Sure thing.”

  “I’d be much obliged.”

  “The war seems like yesterday, doesn’t it, Marshall?”

  Or toda
y, Marshall thought. He explained briefly that he had been looking up people from the war years. They talked for a while about Odile and the parachutists.

  “We were lucky we didn’t bail out and fall in a tree,” he said. “Get an arm torn off.”

  “We were both lucky you landed the plane, Marshall, even if I did have to spend my vacation at Nasty camp in Germany. By the way, did you get my letter about the idea for a reunion?”

  Marshall said that was a fine idea. “We should do that, Al.”

  “Yeah. I’m counting on it.”

  MARSHALL HAD TROUBLE sleeping that night, despite the blackout curtain. Ford was too young to die; they were all too young yet. Campanello and Cochran and Hadley were still busy with careers, and Marshall himself had found a way to keep moving, going off on a wild tangent. He had to seize the moment. Otherwise, he faced a countdown to oblivion.

  More awake, he dreaded the idea of a reunion. Such a get-together seemed like a nightmare. Why should they celebrate their ancient debacle? He shuddered. What would Neil Armstrong do? Armstrong, a man who had disappeared from the limelight, was no superman, he thought. He had read about the time Armstrong brought the X-15 in wrong. He held the nose too high and bounced her off the atmosphere, overshooting the landing zone by miles and miles. Once he got the plane turned around, he almost crashed. He barely cleared the trees at the end of the runway.

  MARSHALL BOARDED THE Métro for Saint-Mandé and went straight to see Caroline. She was arranging shiny green apples, polishing them with her apron. Her crooked smile acknowledged him, as if she had expected him. Bobby was in his basket, looking grumpy, and the kid was unloading oranges.

  “Bonjour, Marshall! Quoi d’neuf?”

  He had news. He had found the woman whose family hid him in 1944, near here, and she knew Caroline’s father. He reported what Annette had told him, adding that he expected to learn more.

  “Don’t give up on your father, Caroline.”