The Girl in the Blue Beret (6 page)

When Marshall picked up his dry cleaning, Mr. Santelli said, “How’s the wife? I don’t see her anymore.”

Marshall said, “Oh, she’s getting along.”

Farewell.

The gas station. The insolent pump jockey in a T-shirt worn outside his jeans, no belt. Kids in France didn’t dress so disrespectfully, Marshall thought. Probably not, anyway.

AS HE WAS
reorganizing his file folders from the war, his eyes fell on two photos of the Albert family. He remembered now that the Alberts had sent these pictures. They had been placed in the wrong folder. Here they were: Pierre and Gisèle, a romantic portrait of them, posed lovingly. It wasn’t a wedding picture. They were older, but still in love.

The other photo was a snapshot of the young boy, Nicolas, in long stockings and short pants that ballooned at the knee. He and two other children posed with a goat tied to a cart. Marshall studied the shaggy yard—a tangle of vines, the outbuildings, the fence, long tufts of grass that hid the children’s shoes. He had spent hours in that yard, mostly after sunset. He would recognize the place instantly.

9.

T
HE NIGHT BEFORE HE LEFT FOR PARIS, MARSHALL DREAMED
he couldn’t pass a check ride. He made goof after goof. He stupidly called out that the reciprocal for due east was 230 degrees. He woke up, kicking off the covers.

Dreams like this were common for many pilots. Marshall would dream he was being tested for his pilot’s license, or his captain’s certification, and everything would go wrong. Numbers etched on his brain did cartwheels. As he lay in bed, he thought about Neil Armstrong, who had commanded the first orbital docking mission. His Gemini capsule had spun out of control. He and his crewmate were spinning so fast they were about to black out, but Armstrong figured out that a thruster must have stuck and made an instant, intuitive move that stopped the spinning. He had to make an unscheduled splashdown in the Pacific, but he prevented a catastrophe and became a national hero.

Looking at himself in the bathroom mirror, Marshall wondered what his own first words on the moon might have been.

“Sorry, folks. I hate to say this but the moon is plug-ugly! We spent twenty billion dollars to come here?

“And where are the moon pies?”

He showered, shaved, ate a bowl of Total, and drank the last of the orange juice. He knocked off the
Times
crossword in fifteen minutes. Then he washed his bowl and tried to think of what he had forgotten. He had half a day to kill. He repacked his two large bags to make room for his portable typewriter, and he stuffed his brain bag with his French books and some of the letters and photos from the war. Reciprocals kept going through his mind.

MARSHALL, ALWAYS DIGNIFIED
on an aircraft, wore dress pants, a blue blazer with brass buttons, and a dark tie. He was seated in row 21, next to two overweight tourists in blue-jeans. It annoyed him to see passengers in jeans. As a pilot, he might have deadheaded in the cockpit jump seat, but now, flying standby, he sat in coach—an aisle seat without even a view of the horizon. He told himself he didn’t need a window. He had crossed the Atlantic so many times, he knew all the coastlines intimately. He sometimes imagined he knew the shapes and textures of particular places in the ocean, the angles of sunlight and shadows on hidden deeps.

When he first joined the airline, the journey to Paris took twenty hours on a Connie, with stops in Newfoundland and Iceland. The pilots slept in shifts, in bunks behind the cockpit. On a 747, the flight was about seven hours. A 747 captain could fly high above the weather on elegant, precise great circle routes. But a Connie flew at fifteen or twenty thousand feet, right in the weather. Marshall would take a Connie between clouds, around them, or sometimes above. He felt that he could maneuver the sky itself to keep the flight smooth. In one of his recurrent flying dreams, he was sitting in an easy chair atop a gleaming metal wing, steering the wing through the sky by thought control.
Bank right
. The huge wing dipped right, just as he wanted.
Straighten. Climb. Accelerate
. The magic machine obeyed precisely. He was alone in the sky, master of flight.

The sun was low when the plane was pushed back from the gate and began its crawl to the taxi lane. He couldn’t see the wing flaps from his seat, but he heard them coming down. Whenever Marshall had deadheaded, he was an alert back-seat driver. He could hear each sound the plane made. He could always hear mistakes.

Captain Vogel’s takeoff today wasn’t bad. Marshall loved the speed, the rush, the power of a takeoff even when he wasn’t in charge. He loved racing down the runway. His mind went through all the moves—easing back the yoke, feeling the wings lifting. You were the plane, the bird. You were soaring, rising, guiding, turning. Breathless. A plane wanted to fly; takeoffs were its natural bent. You trusted yourself to the machine. You
were
the machine. You maneuvered so smoothly that the passengers would think they were sitting in their living rooms. Now, as a passenger, Marshall could hear every note of the ascent. He could feel the engines spool. He could guess the cruising altitude when they reached it. Thirty-six thousand feet, he thought. The heading was about forty-seven degrees east.

The passengers began to squirm after the plane leveled out and the seat-belt sign went off. A woman across from him asked for a blanket.

“Would you like something to drink, sir?” A flight attendant with bulky arms and blowzy hair trundled her cart just past his row and braked it.

“A ginger ale, thanks.”

She scooped the ice with a plastic cup, her fingers touching the ice. The other stew had wrinkles. The airline business was going to hell, he thought. He had to admit their job was hard. Only the stews, on their feet, up and down the aisle, would feel the strain of the 747’s peculiar three-degree nose tilt.

The flight was smooth enough. Airliners had to be flown without flair. In the B-17 sometimes you were bouncing like a child on a rocking horse. The yoke would be vibrating like a jackhammer, and you held on, on a wild ride, better than anything a carnival ever offered.

The man next to him tried to talk about the Mets, but Marshall immersed himself in the packet of V-mail he had written to Loretta from Molesworth Airfield in England.

10.

T
HE LETTERS WERE PHOTOSTATS OF MICROFILMED V-MAIL
—a compact stack of five-by-seven pages of miniaturized handwriting. His eyes lit on random passages as he flipped through the stiff little pages, all written between November 1943 and the end of January 1944.

Dearest Loretta
,

Last night I stumbled through the blackout to a small town nearby. Was almost killed by derby-hatted Englishmen tearing along in the dark on bicycles with no lights! At a pub I had a glass of English beer—which cost me two bob, six pence, along with some kind of meat pie
.

*

Hello, sweetheart
,

Today is typically an English day—in other words, it’s raining lightly, and it’s damp and cold. Our barracks are made of brick and stone, as are nearly all structures in the Isles, due to the scarcity of wood. There are four of us to a room, and we have double-decked beds. There are two lockers and two small “chester drawers,” as my mother used to say. We eat in a mess hall similar to the one in the States. However, we use our mess kits and canteen cups to hold the food and coffee, and fall in a wash-up line at the end of each meal
.

At the Officers’ Club here we may buy English ale between 6 and 10 in the evening and see a free picture show. Yesterday I went over but was unable to get a seat
.

*

Today was wet and cloudy, and there is no moon whatever tonight. On our way to the mess hall in the blackout we manage not to bump into each other by rattling our mess kits
.

*

Our room has a coal stove with a terrific capacity for fuel, and it keeps a guy busy throwing coal into it. I think the hardest thing I’ll ever have to do in the line of duty is getting out of bed in the shivering morning to build a fire in the little monstrosity! Luckily I have my long-handled G.I. drawers. Yesterday, I very ingeniously bored a hole in His Majesty’s floor and installed a piece of pipe on our wash-stand, so that now, instead of having to go outside both to get and dispose of our water, we merely go out to get it. Also built a wooden contraption which I’m using as a clothes-line and wardrobe, but which I’m going to use to hang myself from if I don’t get a letter from you soon!

Love you to death, baby!

He could have been writing from Boy Scout camp, he thought. Such schoolbook phrasings! Of course he couldn’t tell her much under the censorship rules. And he didn’t want to tell some things. The dull smack of enemy shells hitting the plane. The noise up there in the sky when the guns opened up. The giant yellow and orange and red flowers bursting open far below—the beautiful blasts of the bombs his plane dropped.

Dearest Loretta
,

Hootie, Tony and I hopped the bus into a town in this vicinity last night, and after shaking, bouncing and shivering for an hour (the “bus” is a plain old G.I. truck), the driver stopped and said, “Here we are, men—the ‘Target for Tonight.’ ” Believe me, it was a matter
of taking his word for it! It was strange to walk through the fairly crowded streets of this town, hearing voices but seeing only vague forms and shadowy outlines of buildings
.

We found the Red Cross and had a cup of coffee and asked about the nightlife of the metropolis—said nightlife consisted of a skating rink, two cinemas, and a few pubs. We chose the best-recommended pub, got directions, and found it, with a few sneaky blinks of my “torch,” as a flashlight is called here, and divine intuition. It was a barn-like pavilion with a bar and dance floor and a band. The band, let me tell you, wouldn’t worry Harry James very much! During the evening they played “Missouri Waltz” and “Pennies from Heaven”—highly corned-up versions, too
.

The high point of the evening was a raffle. When the fellow came around selling the tickets, due to my uncanny ability to get mixed up on the English language and monetary system, I gave him two half crowns, thinking that would buy two tickets. Instead of two, he gave me thirty-six (!) tickets, so of course I won the damned prize, which was a bottle of Scotch whiskey! That sure beat the pub’s weak beer
.

We had to leave at ten o’clock to catch the truck back “home,” and we made it just in time. We had one of those famous fogs last night, and that plus the blackout really obscured the streets and houses. It was a very cold ride, and did it feel good to be warm again!

*

Honey, I’ve been a seamstress tonight, patching rips in the blackout curtains. Say! Let’s not have black drapes in our dream house, baby. Let’s show we have nothing to hide
.

*

Tonight coming back from the mess hall I learned that war is dangerous! I was absent-mindedly walking on what is the “wrong” side of the road here, and was knocked ears over appetite by a
blacked-out bus—it was only a glancing blow and merely injured my “dignity,” but it surely messed up my only clean pants!

Hootie is standing in the door, letting all our nice cold air out, and letting that nasty old warm air in from outside. I’m thinking of spreading a little water on our floor and using it for a skating rink in the morning
.

Marshall recalled with some fondness those dark, breakneck, nighttime forays and the foolhardy bike races to the mess hall in the early-morning blackness. After a while he had developed a sixth sense about walking in the dark. He tried to act like a keen animal. He learned to relax his pupils to take in more light. He grew sensitive to the nuances of darkness, how the eye could be trained to interpret shapes in the dark. In deep darkness, he learned to move with his arms out ahead. In good moonlight, the landscape was enchanted. And if there were drifts of mist about, sometimes passing across the moon like advertisements trailing behind a small plane, he might feel he had entered another world. The flimsy, scattered mists were pleasant, but the thick fogs smothered and enclosed the base with tooth-chilling cold. The fogs glowed with light borrowed from the moon, a light so dim the eyes could not penetrate it.