The Girl in the Blue Beret (5 page)

Le petit Albert:
the words shimmered.

Restless, he found some ice cream in the freezer and scraped the ice crystals off. It tasted old. In wartime France, ice cream was scarce, he remembered. No one had ice. The same word worked for both.
La glace
.

“In the war he couldn’t get ice cream,” he had heard Loretta explain to someone about his love for ice cream.

They used to have a hand-crank freezer, and when he first tried it, in his attempt to be efficient, he turned the crank as fast as he could and then let it rest a moment, then cranked it again at full gallop.

“That’s not the way you’re supposed to do it,” Loretta said several times. He paid no attention. When the cream began leaking out, he learned that he had made whipped cream, which had swelled quickly.

“I tried to tell you,” Loretta said, laughing. “But you always have to haul off and get the job done. Sometimes I think about offering you a hammer.”

The twenty-three-year-old kid disguised in a Frenchman’s peasant outfit invaded his mind again now, like a pop-up cartoon character. It was the fatuous youth he had seen when catching his reflection in windows.

That night, he dreamed he saw the girl in the blue beret strolling up the Champs-Elysées with a book satchel slung over her shoulder. When he awoke, the dream puzzled him, but then he remembered eating ice cream with her—a small cardboard container of black-market ice cream, smuggled in newspapers and straw.

What had happened to her? Did he have any chance of finding her and her family again? And Robert, who had brought the ice cream on his bicycle. He remembered Robert speaking in hushed tones with Marshall’s host family in Paris. He teased some papers from his coat lining, and the husband and wife studied them for a long time, whispering exclamations. The woman crumpled the papers and tucked them in the stove. Marshall remembered Robert’s bright young face, the meaningful laughter that punctuated what seemed to be a serious discussion. Marshall longed to go out with him, to be of help. Anything. He envied Robert, who went off on hazardous missions, while Marshall was fastened up like a fattening calf.

6.

M
ARSHALL, WAITING FOR JUNE, LIVED ON TV DINNERS—A
slab of meat loaf, mashed potatoes with a stagnant pool of dirt-brown gravy, peas, carrot cubelets, and a cubbyhole of apricot cobbler. Airline food, one of life’s staples. He recalled the scarcity of food in France during the war, the way a family shared its meager rations. He remembered a large carrot, baked in ashes and sliced into five pieces, each piece enlivened with several dusky flakes of an herb.

Sometimes in the evening when he watched an old forties movie, he drank a beer, but his pilot’s discipline still restrained him. Twelve hours from bottle to throttle. He didn’t like to cloud his mind. His brain bag was gathering dust, and his uniform was drooping in the closet. He imagined it hanging there a hundred years in the future. Numbly, he stared at the global map on his wall, Paris gleaming like the North Star.

He still wore his wrist chronometer, set to Greenwich mean time. He was reviewing his French books.

He slept on the studio bed in his den, where he had escaped so many hours over the years—reading books, writing on a portable typewriter, studying French. The kids’ bedrooms, down the corridor in line with the den, were like abandoned stores, still full of merchandise. Like someone studying for exams, Marshall spent his days and nights with the war—books, tapes, and the movies and documentaries on TV. One night he stayed up until two to watch
Twelve O’Clock High
again, and he couldn’t sleep after the movie ended. It was set at an air base in England like Marshall’s. When he closed his eyes, he was flying over the English countryside, low over the patchwork of fields and the white scar along the Channel. Winter-brown fields and hedgerows and clusters of trees enclosed the base, peacefully, as stoic as the English people. When the airmen traveled into Kettering, the quiet village seemed safe and snug until they saw the ration lines and the blank shelves of a grocery.

During a layover in London a few years before, Marshall had returned to the airfield at Molesworth. He took a train to Kettering, then a bus to Thrapston. The train was blue, more modern than the dusty green wartime coach that he recalled. He found the base deserted, with weeds growing through the tarmac, and he recognized the scene—Dean Jagger in
Twelve O’Clock High
returning to his old base and hearing the B-17s roar to life in his memory. So much in the world was predictable, a celluloid cliché, Marshall thought. Like Jagger, he could feel the throbbing of the B-17s, their bodies sexed up and loaded with their bombs. The crews had decorated the noses of their planes with alluring women, cartoon characters, snappy quips.
Dirty Lily
was scantily garbed in black, with raven hair and red puckered lips. She was their figurehead, their cheerleader, their whore and mama all in one. All the guys were ready to fly, bomb the Jerries, be heroes.

The old base was bare and neglected, surrounded by barbed wire, with warning signs. As he stood gazing through the fence, he could make out a distant cluster of trees next to several rows of Nissen huts that had formed the hospital. They appeared derelict. Beyond them, through the trees, he could see one of the stately homes of England, Lilford Hall, a seventeenth-century manor. He remembered how from the air its stonework, with ornate chimneys and split-level roofing, gleamed white, and the sheep in the surrounding fields seemed like connect-the-dots.

THE BASEMENT WAS STUFFED
. Marshall burrowed deep into the closets, sniffing out ancient relics, and pulled out some boxes of letters. A postcard tumbled out. It was a
kriegie
card—
Kriegsgefangenenpost
, a POW postcard.

Dear Marshall, Well, it is not easy to find something to write about. Just wanted to tell you I haven’t forgotten you. I am getting along alright. No news that I can tell. Hope to see you soon. Tell all the folks hello for me. Always, Tony

The card was dated March 2, 1944, only a month after they went down, but it had not been postmarked until March 24, 1945. Tony Campanello was the navigator. He and Al Grainger, the bombardier, and Bobby Redburn, the ball-turret gunner, had been captured by the Germans and were MIA for a year longer than Marshall was.

Loretta had saved all his letters in a box tied with a green velvet ribbon. Marshall thumbed through the early letters from the Texas air base where he trained, now and then losing himself in a description of the barracks or some practical joke the guys had pulled. In a separate packet he found the V-mail letters he had been looking for, letters he had written her from England, and he set those aside, intending to read them at the right time.

He found some addresses in Loretta’s address book, and he began to write letters to the surviving crew about his trip to the crash site and about the boy’s father who died helping one of their gunners. He asked about their own escapes after the crash. Don Stewart, the tail gunner, had died in a Cessna in 1959. Marshall didn’t know how to reach Campanello, so he asked Grainger. “Since you bunked together in that German resort hotel, I figure you might still be in touch with each other,” he wrote, then wondered if he was too flippant. Marshall looked again at the
kriegie
card from Campanello. He didn’t get stateside till June 1945, and he remained in a hospital for many weeks. As far as Marshall could recall, none of the three POWs had ever talked much about life in the stalag.

7.

M
ARSHALL THOUGHT THE FAMILY WHO HID HIM IN PARIS WAS
named Vallon, but in the Resistance, people often took false names. Robert was often there, bringing news and supplies. He bicycled out to Versailles one weekend and brought back a freshly killed goose hidden in a carpetbag. The farmer who sold him the fowl had declared it would be safer for him to carry a slaughtered bird, its honker silenced.

The apartment was alive with feathers, which Mme Vallon carefully saved for pillows. Marshall helped with the plucking. Since the rich smell of roasted goose would attract neighbors, maybe even suspicious German soldiers, Marshall had to be prepared to jump out the back window and to enter the neighboring apartment in case of a heavy knock on the door. The Vallons and their guests enjoyed their goose and their conversation, with a gaiety both genuine and frantic. Amidst the laughter and good will, they insisted that Marshall eat extra, heaping his plate. What was that guy’s last name? Marshall remembered him so well. Robert was good at cards, had a high-pitched laugh but little English. Marshall remembered hearing his bicycle in the vestibule, the two-toot signal of his arrival.

The girl was called Annette. He remembered her laughing. She was standing by the window, half hidden by the lace curtain, with springy spools of brown hair dangling beside her cheeks. She said, “Don’t look, but there are two German officers down there. Their uniforms are so silly! They look like ballerinas in those big pleated coats. Oh, I can’t say this, it’s too embarrassing, but they were walking where the neighbor’s dog was walking and one of them—oh, his boots!” She laughed. “They deserve that!”

At the time he had felt faintly humiliated to be guided through Paris by a girl. Marshall, an American bomber pilot, Scourge of the Sky. But now what she had done for him struck him differently. She was only a young girl, but she had bravely battled the Nazis, to aid high-and-mighty, grounded, hapless Americans like him.

He didn’t know if she was still alive.

8.

T
HE FAMILY PICTURES ON THE WALLS DISTURBED HIM. HE WAS
startled to see Loretta staring at him, or to see the young children smiling, frozen in time. On impulse, he began taking down the pictures.

At a loss for storage space, he decided to stack them in the master bedroom. He had avoided that room for months, but now he forced himself to peek in. The bed was made, and nothing was loose—books, shoes. He had forgotten that on the bedstand on her side of the bed, Loretta had kept a framed photo of him in uniform, taken the year he was promoted to captain. He turned the picture facedown, then noticed the photograph on the wall near the dresser, a publicity shot taken for the airline during the heyday of the Connie. There he was, the co-pilot, with the pilot and the flight engineer, followed by three stews in gray suits and pert little caps. They were crossing the tarmac, and the magnificent Lockheed Constellation was shining in the background. They were a team, the essence of aviation’s glamour. That was what they were selling, and he had been proud to be in the picture.

On the dresser was an earlier photograph: Marshall in his Air Corps uniform and Loretta in a snazzy broad-shouldered suit and an upswept hairdo. She was clutching a purse, and her toes peeked out of sassy pumps. He was her handsome hero; she was his glamour girl, his Loretta Young, his young Loretta.

ALBERT CALLED, TOUCHING BASE
about the house. June was approaching.

“Have you figured out how long you’ll be gone?” he asked.

“No idea. I’m just going to go with the flow—isn’t that what you’re always saying?”

Albert was quiet. Then, in a disturbed tone, he said, “Well, I guess you know what you’re doing.” He paused again. “Is there something special waiting for you there?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“You might as well tell me, do I have any other brothers or sisters?”

“What in the world? Good grief.” Marshall’s anger flashed through his normally rigid reserve.

“It’s O.K. if you do,” said Albert. “I don’t mind.”

Marshall, uncomfortable, stifled the impulse to hang up. He had always avoided contention by leaving.

Dear Albert
,

I know we’ve had our differences. I know I wasn’t always around. That was my job—to go away. I don’t know what to do about it. I’m sorry your mom had to shoulder most of the burden of raising you. The schedule was brutal, but I wasn’t living a double life. I was flying. Now I can’t fly. So I’m going to try something else
.

Love, Dad

He thought this letter but didn’t write it.

An unspoken dab of doggerel, a message to Albert, kept going around in his head:

You owe your existence

To the French Resistance
.

Le petit Albert
. That phrase shot through his mind from time to time, but he couldn’t explain it to his son.

MARY WAS PLEASED
that Albert would look after the house. On the telephone, Marshall assured her that her mother’s things would remain undisturbed and that she could have whatever she wanted.

“Where are you going to stay over there?” Mary asked.

“I’ll stay in a hotel until I can find a place. I’ll let you know.”

Mary was silent. He heard her sigh then. “When are you going?”

“You know me. My bag is always packed.”

She was silent again, but then she said, in a small voice, a child’s, “When will I see you again, Dad?”

THE ODD-JOB GUYS
had been working on the house—caulking, repairing windows and the roof. As Marshall mowed the yard with the gas-powered push mower, he realized that Loretta’s rosebushes and all the shrubs and flowers needed attention. He didn’t expect Albert to care any more about the yard than Marshall ever had.

The Garden Angels descended upon the place one day, working fast and chattering over loud music on a portable radio.

“It looks good,” he told them at the end of an hour.

He arranged for them to come every week and keep the yard in shape.

“I’m the man,” said the chief Angel, a young bronzed guy in a sun hat with a sort of halo wobbling on a spring.