The Girl in the Blue Beret

28.



“MY FATHER HAD TEN CHILDREN,” CAROLINE TOLD HIM THE next evening. She had met him at a café-restaurant she had suggested, near the Sorbonne. “He had five with his wife and five with his mistress. I am one of those from the mistress.” She lowered her head for a moment. “I detest to think of my mother like that. It makes my father less to love. It has been a misery knowing this. I do not even know my brothers and sisters who are from his wife. They grew up in Montreuil and were respectable and went to the Catholic school.”

The room was large and comfortable, with wicker furniture and plush cushions, pastel colors, soft lighting. A peek at the menu confirmed his guess—this was an expensive restaurant. They were sipping aperitifs, something amber in small glasses. She was wearing a low-cut embroidered blouse tight on her breasts. He tried not to stare.

“Let’s order the langoustines!” she said, giving the menu only a glance. “A specialty.”

“Sure,” he said, wondering—and not caring—if langoustines might be pig snouts, or some obscure organ meats. They were the most expensive item.

The waiter came, and Marshall ordered the langoustines for both.

“I like this place!” Caroline said with a smile that illuminated her features. “I come here with my friends whenever we have something to celebrate—not so often! But there are birthdays.”

Her mouth turned up in a crooked half smile—a hint of flirtation. The waiter asked about wine.

“It’s all the same to me,” Marshall said to Caroline. “I’m woefully uncultivated.”

“I’ll choose it,” she said. “It is no bother.”

She said something unintelligible to the waiter, who agreed vociferously.

Marshall asked her, “So you grew up with your mother in Saint-Mandé? Your father did not live with you?”

She nodded. “It is near my father’s other family. He must have wanted to keep his two women close so he wouldn’t have to travel far between them!” She laughed flippantly. Marshall was charmed.

She said, “My mother accepted the arrangement, but when he was at our apartment, it was an obligatory appearance only. This we understood. He didn’t supervise us. He left that to my mother. Maybe he thought he didn’t have that authority. I do not know. My mother kept some distance from him, for she had dignity. She did the cooking for him when he came, and he took care of her, in his fashion. I think she was afraid of him. I was afraid of him.” She stopped, concentrating on tearing a piece of bread.

“Afraid he would hurt you? Hit you?”

“No. But he was a stranger. He was there but not there. I don’t know what played in his mind.” She shuddered.

Marshall was uncomfortable, thinking of his own home life. Albert and Mary would chatter about school or friends or games, and he would gaze out the window.

The wine arrived, and he sampled it carefully. It was dark and rich.

Caroline sipped some wine, then continued, “His mother, my grand-mère, refused to listen to anything bad. I did not know her well. On the point you want to know, about the war, my grand-mère would refuse to listen. ‘Don’t bring it up,’ I can hear her say. She’s dead now, but I can still hear her say so clearly, ‘Robert, your wife doesn’t want to hear that, that other woman doesn’t even have a right to hear it, and I don’t want to hear it; that time is past. It’s over, fini. You have to think about providing for all those little ones. That is the only thing that should concern you.’ ”

Caroline leaned over the side of her chair as if to check on her dog, but she had not brought him. Marshall supposed it was some kind of reflex action, or perhaps she just wanted to expose her cleavage.

She said, “His mother, my grandmother, called my mother ‘that other woman’ in front of me! They did not know each other. Maman didn’t want to hear about the war either. All she asked for was financial support. She dutifully made his dinner on Wednesdays, and he gave her a pile of franc notes, not always the same amount. She never knew if there would be enough.”

“Did he have the épicerie then?”

“He had a business at Montreuil that was in his family for many years, and then he bought the épicerie for my mother. He did have the decency to provide us with the shop.”

“Do any of your brothers and sisters work there?”

She shook her head. “My brother Jean, my brother Claude—they made apprenticeships in construction. My two sisters married. I was married too—for about five years. Not now.”

“Children?”

She shook her head. For a while she talked about her marriage to a lazy machinist obsessed with horse racing. Marshall did not mention Loretta, and she did not ask him personal questions. From time to time he spoke up, to slow down her French or to ask her to repeat something. He didn’t know most of her slang. He was not sure she understood what he wanted. The Robert she was describing did not seem familiar. He knew he was prying, but he liked her voice, the way her breasts moved with all her gestures.

The langoustines appeared—a pile of what looked like overgrown crawfish, or baby lobsters.

“They resemble homards, do they not?” she said with a little laugh.

They hit a language barrier. He couldn’t give her a French word for crawfish, and he didn’t understand homards. The langoustines lay on a bed of rice, in their weird red shells, with long feelers and bug eyes. He had to follow her lead in breaking the shells and slipping out the slim slivers of pink-tinged flesh.

“Take the time,” she said, as she delicately extracted a morsel from the tail and brought it to her lips.

For a while they worked on the food, which seemed more like a surgical operation than a meal. Marshall was sitting with a view of some old black-and-white photographs, perhaps from wartime, on the wall behind her. He couldn’t keep from looking at them, as if he might recognize someone. Caroline obliviously tackled her pile of crusty sea creatures. Earlier, as she told about her mother, he was studying a photo of mothers leading children across a cobblestone street, mothers in head-scarves tied in a triangle. Loretta wore a scarf that way in the forties, he recalled. That photo was between a picture of a line of people outside a boulangerie and a picture of a crowd of young people dancing in the street.

“He gave my mother the épicerie,” Caroline repeated. “And now it is mine—since she died.”

“Does he ever come into the shop?”

She wiped her lips with her napkin carefully, then said, “No. He is never there.”

“Then how can I find him?” he asked impatiently.

“I don’t know.”

“The kid said he was in Beaucaire.”

“My cousin—Michel.”

“Is your father in Beaucaire?”

She shrugged. “I haven’t spoken to him in five years.”

There was a trace of sadness in her voice, but also bitterness.

“I really would like to find the Robert I knew,” he said. “Maybe I’ve got the wrong one. Don’t you have a picture of him?”

“He was no father to me,” she said.





THEY FINISHED THE MEAL chatting about other subjects. She wanted to know about California and New York, and he told her about flying 707s cross-country. She ordered coffee and chocolate cake, but he declined.

“Coffee is for mornings,” he said. “It’s the insomniac’s enemy.”

“Nonsense. One cannot conclude a good meal without some coffee. And of course some cheese or a sweet.” Her mouth turned up in a crooked half smile.

“I’ll pass,” he said. But he caught her smile and peered into her eyes.

Walking from the Métro at Alésia, rounding the corner past the dark hulk of the church, he thought about how her skin had glowed, how she laughed as she broke the little tails of the shellfish. Before they said au revoir, she had invited him to dinner at her apartment, in a week, and he had said yes. She offered to look for some old photographs of her father. He would have said yes even if she had said photographs of her ex-husband.


THE NEXT MORNING, a cloudy Saturday, Marshall telephoned Nicolas.

“Can that be true?” Nicolas said. “He has disappeared? Something odd is going on. She told me he was in Provence.”

“She said her father’s family had lived in Montreuil, so maybe that’s a clue. I’m looking at a map. Maybe I could find the other business he owns. Maybe he’s there.”

“I checked on that and found nothing.”

“I can’t connect the guy she described to the Robert I remember,” Marshall said. “And where is he?”

Marshall had the map spread on the bed, tracing his finger from the Saint-Mandé Métro stop to the zoo. “There’s intrigue here, Nicolas! Maybe he’s one of those guys who thinks the war is still going on, and he’s gone underground. Pardon me, I’ve been reading too many French mystery novels.”

Nicolas laughed. “Maybe you should get on the Métro, Marshall, to seek him underground. Or the sewers of Paris, perhaps.”

“That reminds me—what was the station I left from to go south, toward Spain?”

“The Gare d’Austerlitz. The trains go south.”

“I don’t think I’ve been there since the war.”

“That’s where you would have departed with your guide, who could have been Lebeau. And, Marshall, you must know—it is the station where they sent the Jews out.”

“Isn’t Germany north?”

“They were sent to internment camps in France first.”

“I see.”

“Maybe you don’t. The French interned them.”

He paused. Marshall didn’t know what to say.

Nicolas said, “Don’t worry, Marshall. I will make some more inquiries, hoping to hear things Bourgogne. I will busy myself.”

“I appreciate your help, Nicolas. Here I am in Paris, an old guy on the loose. Sometimes I feel pretty mixed up.”

“Don’t worry, Marshall. You have friends here. One day, perhaps, you will be content. Don’t forget my parents are expecting you here again in Chauny for a grand Sunday at their table. Maman will invite you.”

“I haven’t forgotten. Merci, Nicolas. Au revoir!”