The Girl in the Blue Beret (9 page)

At the nearest soda fountain, crowded with GIs and their families and sweethearts, they had Cokes and he ate a genuine hamburger. The sumptuousness of the hamburger, paired with its sweet carbonated companion, sent him into a reverie. Here was this girl showering him with devotion. She was swinging from side to side on the spinning stool next to his. Her dress was white, with red polka dots, and the skirt flounced at the hem. She crossed her legs and deliberately showed her knees. She wasn’t petite like the French girls, he thought. He held her waist and stopped her singsong swinging. She sucked the straw of her Coke, leaving lipstick. He had kissed off all her lipstick, but she had reapplied it. It was bright red, for the polka dots of her dress.

FROM CINCINNATI, HE MADE
an obligatory visit to his relatives down in the mountains. The bus ride to Harlan was a strange, grim little trip. He found an uncle dying of lung disease and his wife unable to grow her garden because she no longer had the breath to climb the hill behind their dog-trot house. Marshall hated this place where the coal mines had destroyed his parents and grandparents. He had never wanted to go back there.

If they had been worried about him during the war, no one said. They all said Marshall looked older. They wouldn’t have recognized him. No one wanted to hear about the war. His Uncle Jimmy refused to believe that Marshall had been a bomber pilot. His cousin Herman tried to get him to come back and work in the mines. One of his aunts accused him of gallivanting and pleasuring himself while his kinfolks needed him. His Aunt June Bug insisted on living alone after her stroke. His cousin Dan had moved to Richmond and was working at an ammunitions depot—doing what, no one could say exactly.

Marshall knew he had been an oddball in that family for years because his parents had moved north to Ohio. After they died, he had lived with Aunt Shelby in Cincinnati and learned proper English in school. He would never have tolerated being teased the way some of the backwoods boys in the Army were. Marshall never apologized for seeking an education. He went to college for a couple of years before the war. What he wanted in Loretta was everything he didn’t find in his relatives. She listened to the Metropolitan Opera on the radio. She liked museums. She lectured him once on the historical significance of the gargoyles on the buildings in downtown Cincinnati. He liked seeing Loretta parade her culture. She had class. When he saw gargoyles on Notre Dame in Paris, they seemed almost like old friends.

11.

C
APTAIN VOGEL HAD BEGUN HIS INITIAL DESCENT INTO PARIS IN
the early-summer dawn. It had been dark only briefly during the night, and Marshall dozed, Molesworth memories swirling in his mind. He always had trouble sleeping on an airplane. As soon as sleep shut down his hearing, he would awake with a jolt, thinking the engines had quit.

When both his seat mates left for the lavatory, Marshall leaned across to the window, to see if the plane was flying over the Channel, as he had guessed. Spotting England’s familiar shore, he yearned for Molesworth. Molesworth was where he had lived up to his ideal of himself. Before everything fell apart.

The morning they took off on the mission, their tenth, Marshall was making a secret bet with himself on how far he would get with Nurse Begley when he returned. Her front teeth were like Chiclets, shiny and squared off, and she framed them with bright lipstick the color of cherries—not pie cherries, but whiskey-sour cherries. She tasted more like pie, though. He was a fool. She was from out west, with bony hands and long legs and thick, radiant hair, and she had a habit of slinging her hip in a shooting stance. Her name was Annie, but the flyboys called her Nurse Begley because of her name tag bouncing on her chest. The formal name made it easier to mock their own lust for her and her great bazooms. Her name tag bobbed squarely atop the left one. Nurse Begley was Rita Hayworth in chestnut hair.

Marshall had had his chance to impress Nurse Begley the night before. She had agreed to meet him outside Lilford Hall, where the nurses bunked. Lord Lilford hunkered in one wing of his place.

“He’s probably down to a butler and three footmen,” Marshall joked.

“We heard he sits in his basement with earmuffs on,” Nurse Begley said.

“What? He doesn’t like airplanes outside his window?”

“The noise of us nurses is probably worse,” she said with a laugh and a Hayworth toss of her hair. Her chest jiggled.

“We take off right over his house.” Marshall grinned. “From the air, it looks like a toy palace in a train set.”

“That’s nice, to think that his house might not be so grand,” she said. “Depending on how you look at it.”

Nurse Begley was in her off-duty skirt and jacket, and her trench coat was unbuttoned. He backed her up against the ivy-covered wall of Lilford Hall, their bodies curving close.

“What do you like to do at home?”

“Do we have to talk about home?” she said, fondling his lapel.

He kissed her deeply, jamming her into the rustling winter ivy.

“Say—you want to give me a good-luck charm to take with me? Ten to one says I go out in the morning.”

“What?” She was rummaging in her shoulder bag. “I need my hair clip, my lighter … Hmm.”

“Knickers,” he said.

Her giggles aroused him.

“In the winter the English girls wear something they call woollies to keep them warm,” she said. “An English girl gave me some.”

“That would be swell.”

Thrilled, he watched as she wriggled out of the woollies, sliding them down her bare legs, crumpling them into a wad, and with a slight caress of his frontage, she tucked them into his pocket.

“Good night, flyboy,” she said. “Good luck tomorrow.”

He slept with his face in her woollies, and indeed they stayed roasty-toasty. In the morning, he stashed them in his leather flight jacket.

“DROP YOUR COCKS
and grab your socks, boys,” said the runner at 0400 hours. “Breakfast at 0500 hours.”

The mess sergeant barked, “Combat eggs for breakfast. Load up, fellas. And pick up your sandwiches before you go. Nobody wants to be hungry in Germany.”

“I’m not going to be
in
Germany, pal,” said Hootie. “I’m going to be
over
Germany.”

Next, the Nissen hut with the big maps on the wall. The Nissen was a makeshift structure of corrugated metal where all that day’s crews crowded to learn the “Target for Today.” The room steamed with the body heat of flyers duded up in their leather jackets and bulky flight garb as the top brass unveiled the flight plan and the weather guy added his two cents’ worth. The big chalkboards listed each plane.

When the target was revealed, there was a shocked silence, then nervous jokes and groans. As usual.

“Send me to the rest home right now,” Grainger said to Marshall.

The flyers watched the general with his pointer, the commanders, the couriers rushing in with news.

The flyers rode to the equipment room to gather gear—chute pack, Mae West, flak suit—a bag of stuff big enough for a two-week vacation. Then the jeeps and trucks carried the flight crews out to the hardstands, where the ground crews were loading the bombs and making last-minute inspections.

Next, Cupid’s leap—the contortionist act required to board a B-17. Marshall swung himself upward into the hatch opening of the
Dirty Lily
. Grab the rim with both hands, kick your legs up and in, then slide forward on your ass. One of the ground guys called, “See you at 1500 hours, Lieutenant.”

The takeoff from Molesworth in the dawn was a spectacle. The planes lined up nose to tail on the taxiway and headed for the turn onto the runway. The flashing reflections off the planes taxiing ahead sometimes blazed like machine-gun fire. The roar of the engines was lyrical, like the thunder of a herd of young horses, spirited and healthy. Engines revving, the planes sashayed out in a long, slow file, waddling side to side. B-17s were tail draggers. For a better view over the noses, the pilots wriggled the planes sideways—left, then right, left, then right. Under other circumstances, it might have seemed comical.

As each plane reached the top of the runway, it turned, still rolling. Throttles went forward, the engines bellowed, and the ship raced into the air, following those ahead, with more coming just behind. Liftoff after liftoff, one every thirty seconds. They climbed out of the ground gloom into brilliant sunlight and began circling the field, maneuvering to establish their formation, each bomber slipping into its assigned slot.

Marshall believed the B-17 was an elegant aircraft. He had been so young, so cocksure, he took it for granted that hundreds of heavy bombers could squeeze together in tight aerial patterns and fly long distances with no collisions, no peppering one another with all their bristling machine guns, no smashing one another with their long streams of deadly bombs. In training, he hadn’t yet grasped how stupefyingly harmonious a full operational mission would be—a thousand bombers hurtling through the sky as a single, immense, layered entity, a unified airborne fleet.

The flight to Frankfurt was steady and routine—that is, nerve-wracking and physically exhausting. Marshall loved it. He loved that exuberance that came from the closeness of other Forts. Riding in the turbulence from the planes around them was exhilarating. He and Webb took turns holding position on the west ship’s wing tip. The physical effort to hold their plane in formation was like roping a steer and pressing it down for hour after hour. Working the throttles, constantly adjusting and readjusting speed, flicking their eyes from the instruments to the sky and back, kept them from thinking about the cold. The contrails from the planes ahead and above blew past in steady streams, chalk marks etching the sky. They were in the dazzling midst of a beautiful deadly force. Marshall was on the alert for unusual moves by the fighter escorts, the “little friends,” or some looming Nazi bastard. He needed the eyes of a fly, omnidirectional.

The roar of many thousands of engines was a thunderous symphony. The air was North Pole cold, but the sheepskin-lined helmet and his leather jacket were cozy, and the cockpit had some heat. Farther back, the waist gunners shivered in the open windows, but they wore electric flight suits. In battle they could warm themselves with the heat of their busy guns. Hootie claimed he never noticed the cold.

At ten thousand feet, they donned their “Halloween masks” for oxygen. They were up too high to smoke, too high to breathe—just when Marshall could have used a cigarette. At twenty thousand feet, he saw the ground as an abstraction, a schematic of peaceful farmland, brown like faded, worn-out rugs. As they flew farther north, snow cover started to appear, until the ground was a patchwork of whites, like overlapping tablecloths of varying pale shades.

Time passed, the timelessness that takes over when every split second is eternal. It was peaceful—until they met some Messerschmitts he did not care to remember.

Near target, Al Grainger crawled past the cockpit on his way to the bomb bay to pull the pins.

“Al’s dressing his eggs!” Hootie yelled through the inter-phone as he always did.

Webb, the pilot, issued his routine reprimand. “Cut the blab, boys.”

He transferred control to the bombardier at the IP, the initial point on the approach. As always, Webb said, “O.K., bombardier, you got it.” Easing back from the controls, he joked to Marshall, as always, “Now it’s relax time.”

Grainger leaned into his bombsight, making only the slightest adjustments of their course. Here in the heart of enemy territory, they stopped all their evasive maneuvers and plowed ahead, straight and level, as if begging the German flak gunners to pick them off. Just when they needed to twist and skitter most, they renounced defensive maneuvers. They drove toward the target until the eggs finally streamed from the
Dirty Lily
’s belly and the pilots could take control again.

Marshall heard Grainger call “bombs away.”

As the bombs—M-17 cluster incendiaries—fell away, the plane lifted like a balloon. Suddenly lightened, she soared with relief.

12.

C
HARLES DE GAULLE AIRPORT WAS BELLIGERENTLY MODERN, WITH
bleak, functional terminals and hangars, but today the morning mist gave the place a touch of mystery.

I can start life over
, Marshall said to himself as he marched through the jetway. He had to, he thought. What else should a retired pilot do but effect
un grand changement
?

He hitched a ride into the city with the crew. Captain Vogel had insisted, since Marshall had reserved a room at the regular crew hotel. Accustomed to carry-on bags, the crew had waited for him while he detoured into baggage claim, and after enduring some small talk and inane senior-citizen jokes, here he was again at the familiar place. It was a modest hotel with breakfast in the basement.

“
Bienvenue
, Captain Stone,” said Charles, the clerk, an old acquaintance, at the desk. “You fly your airplane to us again.”