The Girl in the Blue Beret (24 page)

“Dad—are you awake? I’ve got your old friend here. Marshall.”

James’s voice on the line was shaky, but his midwestern cadences were familiar, and Marshall found himself talking easily with the former top-turret gunner.

“I can still picture you standing up there in your greenhouse, James,” Marshall said. “Aiming that gun in every direction at once.”

James laughed, a thin rasp. “Marshall, your letter was the best thing that’s happened to me since I got sick.”

After more chitchat, Marshall explained his move to Paris and asked about Robert Lebeau. “I don’t know for sure, but I think he may have been the guy who helped me too. Do you remember the family you stayed with?”

“No, not very well. They went off to work and left me in a little room, so I didn’t see them much.”

“Was there a daughter?”

“Might have been.”

“Annette? The Vallon family?”

“No, that doesn’t ring a bell.”

“I’m trying to find the family I stayed with. There was also a guy who was there a lot. I think he might have been Lebeau.”

“I don’t even know why I remember his name. But he impressed me a lot.”

“You said he had a girlfriend.”

“He had a girl with him at the train. I thought they were sweethearts, because they seemed so interested in each other I wasn’t even sure they saw us flyers. But I don’t remember seeing her again. When he came to visit the family I stayed with, he was alone. I think he came over with information, what they were supposed to do and so on.”

“The guy I knew didn’t speak English,” Marshall said.

“This boy didn’t either … but somebody translated for me. That’s how I knew something about him. He talked about church a lot. I guess he was Catholic.”

“Do you remember where in Paris this was?”

“Oh, a ways from downtown, I think.” James’s voice broke, and he began to falter. “I just can’t remember.”

“You said he was dressed in heavy country clothes and workmen’s boots?”

“He dressed like he was going to cross the mountains himself.”

“I’m glad somebody had good shoes,” Marshall said.

They laughed together. “That’s the truth!” James said. “I never thought I’d live to think that was funny, but I had these shoes that were like bedroom slippers! I cried for my good old A-6 flying boots, but I’d gotten rid of them.”

“Yeah, all of us Americans with our big feet and GI boots.”

James laughed again, but he sounded weak. “I’m sorry, Marshall.”

“I’d better let you go,” Marshall said, regretting that he couldn’t continue his relentless probe.

“I’m so glad to hear from you, Marshall. Maybe I never told you this, but you did a damn fine job landing our Fort.”

“Thank you. You could have done it yourself, James. You were a flight engineer second to none.”

“I don’t know about that.”

“See you, old buddy.”

Marshall felt guilty, pouncing on James’s last good moments, moments that belonged to his family. He wasn’t sure he had learned anything worthwhile. He was wandering through a land of ghosts, slivers of memory, clues floating like summer midges.

32.

C
AROLINE’S NARROW STREET WAS ONE SPOKE IN AN INTERSECTION
of five streets. It reminded him of an
étoile
, like the design one could see from the top of the Arc de Triomphe. Marshall had picked up more tourist lore in his past few weeks in Paris than he had in all the years of flying in and out of the city. Then, he was thinking only of his next flight, or reviewing his last flight for mistakes. Now, he was surprised to notice occasionally that he hadn’t been thinking about flying. It had been twenty-two days since he had been at the controls of any vehicle. Instead, he had been zipping around on the Métro, the subterranean opposite of the limitless friendly skies. He liked the speed of the trains. He liked the way the train to Saint-Mandé twisted and turned just before it reached the station.

At the intersection he passed two drugstores, a
tabac
, and two small cafés. He detoured around a minor motorcycle accident—a disheveled, shaken biker, his mangled
moto
, two police cars. Caroline’s building, a stone structure with pale blue shutters, was a block from the accident. She had told him to ring number 3A. There was no name listed. After she buzzed him in, he walked up the three flights, proud of his sturdy heart and hardly out of breath.

Caroline was waiting on the landing outside her open door. She was wearing a short, silky Indian dress in a soft pale green color. Her lipstick was slightly off-center, accentuating the slant of her smile.

“Please be comfortable,” she said, settling him on a hard divan. Her dog slept through his arrival.

“Bobby is getting old,” she explained, caressing the dog’s head. “He must have his little naps.”

“People are crazy about dogs in the U.S.,” Marshall said. “And cats.”

“Did you have a pet?”

“No. Well, my children did, but I never had one that was my own pet.”

She gave him an aperitif, something sweet and gingery. Her apartment was chock-a-block with bric-a-brac, hanging beads and bells, and curling posters of movie stars and impressionist painters. There was an atmosphere of musty old Paris in the room. He couldn’t take in all the gewgaws.

Sitting down with the dog between them, she said, “Tell me about the United States! Tell me about your home, and where you were born.”

“I started out in Kentucky.”

“Kentucky! Oh, I want to go to Kentucky. What a marvelous word. My life’s dream is to go to the United States.”

“Really?”

“I used to know an American who said he would marry me and take me to the state of Minnesota, but he was teasing me. He never meant it.”

The talk meandered. She seemed less nervous with him, more aware of him. He was aware of her legs, her smooth knees, her lips, her clinging dress. Her earrings struggled inside the flow of her hair. But as she talked, he examined her features for hints of Annette. The slight curl in her lip? The same shade of hair?

At her insistence, he described the life of an airline pilot. He avoided the technicalities, skipped the frustrations with the management, skirted the stews, and probably made the whole enterprise seem as glamorous as she wanted it to be.

“I flew to Rome five years ago and got airsick on the way back,” she said with a frown. “Did you get airsick when you crashed your bomber?”

“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.