The Girl in the Blue Beret (8 page)

The girl, nameless in his memory, wore something lacy beneath her skirt. She cuddled with him for a long while before they went ahead. She said, “It’s good; it doesn’t matter. It’s all right, baby.”

“Hold me close.”

“Sure, baby.”

He wanted her warmth. He wanted to be enclosed, blanketed with her soft flesh.

“This is stupid to say,” he said, “but you’re soft like those doughnuts you bring. And sweet too.”

She only giggled and didn’t mind. She smoothed and admired his shoulders; she deposited little breathy kisses all over his stomach. She sat up, hands on her hips, and said, “Let me be the girl on your bomber nose. You do have a girl on your plane nose, don’t you? You all do.”

He laughed, but he wouldn’t utter the name
Dirty Lily
. She didn’t pry.

When it was time to leave, she pulled on her stockings carefully, snapping them to the belts, straightening the seams, checking her look in the mirror. He thought he would not see her again. He was going to bomb Hitler to hell, and she was giving him energy for the job, obtained without regret or guilt or pain.

She said, “Come to the Rainbow Corner whenever you get your pass to London. Ask for me. There’s always something going on there. And so much dancing! Some of these guys can dance all night. Ask for Miss—”

After a mission to Bremen, he went to the Rainbow Corner, the Red Cross canteen, but he did not see her anywhere in the crowded room. He asked for her, but she wasn’t on duty. He gathered with the crowd around the radio for the news—nothing good. The news from the Pacific was abstract. The news from the Italian front was mostly about the ground war. It did not seem real either. He smoked a Woodbine cigarette with a girl named Julie. He had a Coca-Cola and a sandwich, talked to several Red Cross girls, then walked around London. The crowds were trundling along, busy and quiet. Umbrellas popped out a couple of times, but he strode on in the cold mist, past Saint Paul’s, Big Ben, the Parliament. Here and there he saw the unmistakable damage from the Blitz, and he wondered who might have been standing there as the Luftwaffe swung over, raining explosives. Seeing the destruction, he felt no qualms about bombing the bejesus out of Germany. As he ambled through St. James’s Park, near 10 Downing Street, he saw that the streets around Buckingham Palace were blocked, and he detoured over into Regent’s Park. Later, at a small tearoom, he noticed the pasty faces of the malnourished and sleep-deprived, hunched over their tea and biscuits. He felt disembodied, juggling several realities at once. He was an American pilot, among friends, allies; he was a stranger, yet a friend, with an overlapping history. He noticed admiring glances. But RAF pilots were jealous of the American flyers. One called out to him, “Hey, Yank!” Out in the slow traffic, the tall red buses seemed comical. He passed girls bundled in tired tweed, their hats worn close, their stockings thick and wrinkled. It was a cold day, one that made him wish for his soft fleece-lined bomber helmet, but he knew he appeared snappy in his Air Corps uniform, with his lieutenant stripes, his smartly creased trousers, his shined winter shoes, his overcoat slung over his arm.

He was self-aware, charged with purpose. That’s how he remembered his younger self, anyway. He was in the midst of the greatest undertaking in human history. He was in the middle of either the greatest victory or the greatest catastrophe ever known. Or both.

NOW, ON A JUMBO JET
to Paris, he wasn’t sure he remembered his youthful self any better than he remembered the Doughnut Dolly.

Albert had denigrated Marshall’s war. He said America was imperialistic, that Truman shouldn’t have dropped the atomic bomb. On one occasion, Albert casually remarked, “Everyone knows the U.S. is the worst country on earth. I’m thinking of going to live in some foreign country where everything is real. Someplace in South America. Or India.” Marshall recalled staring with amazement at his son, who was on spring break from college.

On that January day in 1944, when Marshall walked through St. James’s Park, the war was raging. The skies over Germany were filled with death. But in a way, Marshall and his buddies went to war as cavalierly as Albert entertained moving to Nepal.

A scene arose in his memory. Years ago, when Albert and Mary were children, they were roller-skating up and down the sidewalk in front of their house in New Jersey. Rain began falling, and Marshall rushed out to close the windows of his car.

“You’ll get wet, kids,” he said, but they didn’t seem to mind the rain.

They rolled on down the sidewalk as though he were invisible and they were protected from him.

MARSHALL WAS NO LONGER
sure whether he had first been untrue to Loretta before Christmas that winter at Molesworth or after. He recalled an evening in Brington, on a pass after a mission to Kiel. He found himself in a room above a pub with an English girl, who didn’t volunteer her name, and he finally asked. Madge. It was an icy night, with icicles glinting in the fog. She had a brown paper parcel tied with string, something for “me mum,” she said. Under the dim light of a blackout bulb, they undressed each other clumsily. The poor illumination made her more attractive than she probably was.

After January 11, the mission to Oschersleben, it no longer seemed to matter if he was untrue to Loretta. But he hadn’t even flown that day. Marshall and his crew did not go out because the
Dirty Lily
had a fuel-line problem. They watched forty-one B-17s depart, and for the rest of the day they sweated out the mission with the ground crew.

By tea time everyone’s nerves were on edge.

As the first returning planes began to roll in, the jitters only intensified.

“What’s the count?”

“Twenty-seven, I think.”

They watched and listened, long past tea time, but no other planes came. Four planes had aborted early. Ten planes were missing.

Marshall imagined the lord of Lilford Manor having his tea, whether or not the planes returned. He shared his fancy house with a flock of nurses. Marshall had been to the place for a nurses’ dance. Long-legged Nurse Begley—where was she now?

At mess, they heard a familiar rumbling, then the siren of the ambulance. They rushed out, mouths still full, to see who was coming home. It was not one of theirs but a Fortress from another base, a straggler that couldn’t go any farther.

“At least somebody made it,” Marshall said when they returned to their quarters. “Whoever the hell they are.”

One of his roommates, Al Grainger, threw his boots at the wall and said, “If I get back to the States alive, I’m going to fuck the first fifty girls I see, including the Statue of Liberty.”

“Is she carrying a torch for you?”

“I think so. I’ve lost my torch.”

“It’s under your bunk.”

Grainger rummaged beneath the bed and retrieved his flashlight.

But all light was forbidden outside at night. He dropped the light on his bed, and they headed to the Officers’ Club to get drunk.

“Where the hell is Oschersleben anyway?” asked Grainger.

That night Marshall wrote to Loretta,
Same old same old today. Trying to do my job. I’m starting to like English tea. I polished my shoes; etc., etc. Miss you badly, honey. Lights out now
.

“HIT ME,” MARSHALL SAID
to the dealer. The
snap-snap
of cards distracted him from the roar in his ears left over from his pleasure jaunt over Bremen the previous day. He had been in the lead plane of his squadron, and he felt cocky. The losses on January 11 had made him angry, and he suspected that Webb was scared. Webb sat at the yoke mostly in silence, and he seemed unnerved when they neared the target. When he handed off control to the bombardier, he pressed his trembling hands on his knees. The landscape below was a dusty white, patches of snow below.

Hootie couldn’t stop talking about a pilot named Gorman, who hadn’t come back from Oschersleben. Hootie, furtively regarding his cards, said, “What do you think—he could have escaped and gone over to someplace safe, some nice island with a white beach, nice sand. Good landing strip, long flat beach. He could be there, with women in little swimming-suits made out of feathers, and they could be gobbling coconuts and oranges.”

“Ambrosia,” said Marshall. They looked at him. “Coconuts and oranges. My mother made it. It had bananas in it too.” He was recalling a dish so special, so rare, that it was like a taste of paradise. Ambrosia. Only at Christmas.

“Yeah, bananas. A banana tree right there. Gorman would pick a banana and peel it back and put it in her mouth just so—” Hootie was demonstrating, but the laughter around him was hollow.

“Knock it off, Hootie.” He was a goofball, always going off on a mental tangent.

“You’ll get grounded, you keep rattling your mouth like that,” said a radio operator, a glum guy who never cracked a smile.

“Who’s in?” asked the dealer.

Guys like Gorman left and didn’t come back. They disappeared. A magic act—
poof
. There one day, gone the next. No one saw or heard what had happened.
Poof
.

Marshall studied Loretta’s portrait, the flat, two-dimensional inanimate thing made of light and shadow, and wondered how he could possibly hold it dear. It wasn’t her. He should save her for later. If he succumbed too deeply now, he could be spiraling toward a tropical beach, with Gorman. He needed the sharp edges of his mind. He turned her facedown, like a playing card, on the rough wood of the fruit crate.

That weekend everyone was drunk. A load of WAAFs was trucked in for the officers’ dance at the manor. They were auxiliary for the RAF, working with the crews on one of the nearby bases. Those women drove trucks, worked the radio, manned the check-in stations.

“We do everything but drive the plane,” one told him. “But we steal flips—when a pilot’s going up at night for a little ride and wants to take somebody along. I always go. It’s grand.”

“She’s got a stomach of iron, that one,” said a frowsy brown-haired girl. “I’m glad I’ve got my two feet planted.”

Marshall danced with a tall gal called Sal, who was wearing her mother’s old rabbit wrap, with her hair slung up in a truck driver’s regulation pompadour. The American nurses danced in their jazzy uniforms. They had changed out of their bloodstained brown-striped seersucker nursing dresses.

MARSHALL HAD BEEN
scheduled to fly on January 29, but the fog pushed down on the planes as if it were a heavy weight, grounding them. It didn’t lift until nearly noon. The mission was delayed for two days.

The morning of the thirty-first was clear, but the courier running from the weather station reported clouds toward Frankfurt by afternoon. In truth, you couldn’t think logically that far ahead. Marshall was eager to go. His mental wings were flapping like a migrating goose.

The commander was Hornsby, a short, no-nonsense man with bulging eyes like a pug dog. Marshall had observed him coming out of the Officers’ Club late one night, pulling on his leather gloves as if he had a job to do that instant. He was walking with deliberation, almost scurrying, as if he couldn’t keep up with himself, as if his thoughts were racing ahead, his plans and schemes already airborne. He was a man who could envision and execute a swarming.

For a swarming was what it was, when thirty or forty planes took off from Molesworth, one by one, and then circled and began to swirl into formation. Soon the crews could see other swirls around them, as other formations from other bases in England began to join in. Squadrons joined squadrons, becoming sixty-ship combat wings. Before long, there were nearly a thousand planes, from all the air bases in England, the Mighty Eighth Air Force of heavy bombers with their loads. It was intense, impossible to exaggerate, enormous. And later, when their fighter escorts arrived, hovering above, it was a truly colossal force.

It was a sight the world would never see again, Marshall thought, those redoubtable goose-flock Vs hell-bent toward their target. Hundreds and hundreds of aircraft,
clouds
of them. The flyboys rode through the tangled currents of slipstreams for as long as eight hours, their adrenaline levels shooting sharp. The shudder and shake of the yoke—the little boy on his rocking horse, the high-hearted man mounting the anonymous woman.

The men on the plane that day: Cochran, Campanello, Ford, Grainger, Hadley, Redburn, Stewart. Stone. Lawrence Webb. Hootie Williams.

Hootie!
The name still ripped his guts.

WHEN HE RETURNED
from the war and saw Loretta again, she expected him to propose to her in an old-fashioned way. He had arrived in Cincinnati on a troop train from Philadelphia, and she had taken the bus to Union Station. The grand dome of the station was so immense he felt like a toy soldier beneath it.

“You’re the handsomest thing I ever saw in my life,” she cried. “Sweetheart, you’re all mine!”

Her warmth flowed through him, promising to erase the recent past. He felt it slipping away, like a spiral movement in his mind.

Her flirtatious manner seemed exaggerated, the bow on her hat whimsical, her giggle girlish. It was jarring, seeing this innocent, naïve girl. He was overwhelmed with joy to be with her, on U.S. soil again. The last months were fading into a dark dream. Yet she was a stranger, like somebody’s kid sister, altogether too silly and carefree to take seriously. He had not seen a woman behave this way in months. This girl Loretta might have been going to taffy pulls.