The Girl in the Blue Beret

33.



“IT WAS SO LAMENTABLE,” SHE SAID. WHEN SHE WAS YOUNG, HE was kind. He came every Wednesday evening, like a Father Christmas, bringing oranges or peaches or asparagus, something in season. He presented them as gifts, twisted in newspaper inside an old basket. He came in singing, and he petted each of the children, in turn, according to size. She was the middle child of the five, and as the family grew, his basket became larger. He drew amusing pictures for them. He taught them songs, for he was always singing, and he knew the children’s songs, the folk songs, the chansons, the religious songs. When they grew older he recited poetry—Verlaine, she remembered.

When he sang “Dans le silence de la nuit,” he might have been a choir angel, the melody in his voice was so sweet. But he drank too much, and his behavior was unpredictable. Gradually, his visits became erratic and unpleasant. She couldn’t say when the change began. He gushed over the children and sloshed his wine on everything, including their heads. Late one evening when she was about ten, he arrived very drunk. The younger children were in bed, and she was reading. He entered her mother’s bedroom. She heard shouting and crying. She was used to their loud noises, but this was different. Her mother was crying, and Caroline could make out some of the words. Her mother was insisting that he couldn’t do something or other, pleading. “No, no, no,” she said. Caroline’s young mind trembled in fear of her father, who had sung the chansons so sweetly.

She heard her mother say, “I beg you, tell me how I can live with this.”

“You have nothing to do with it!” he cried in a high voice.

“You cannot go on like this.”

“This is the way I am.”

“No, it does not have to be.”

Caroline went to comfort her two little brothers, who had awakened. The cuckoo clock on the wall had not worked in years, but suddenly, as the voices in the bedroom grew louder, the cuckoo strutted out of its hole and gave two loud cuckoos, as if to say “Chut!” Shut up.

Caroline believed the cuckoo was an omen. As her parents continued to argue, she could bear no more, and she burst into her mother’s bedroom. Her father stood there, on one side of the bed, with her mother on the other, against the wall. They were fully dressed, and when she entered, their faces dropped, their voices lowered, and her father said, “Hello, my little artichoke.”

“Yes, did you say your prayers?” her mother said.

Her father patted her on the head, waved goodbye to her mother, and left the apartment.

After that night, he came less often. Then his visits stopped altogether. On Wednesdays the boys asked where the basket of surprises was. It was a long time before they discovered that their mother had been going to visit Robert in the hospital. She would not take the children to see him. His wife and their children visited him on Sundays, and Caroline’s mother visited on Saturday afternoons. Caroline heard later that it was a psychiatric hospital, where he had shock treatments to dull his skewered mind, but her mother would not confirm this rumor. After he was released, she managed to keep him away from the children. There was a calmness around the apartment then.

A year later, Caroline was in the apartment one evening with her two little brothers when her father appeared, drunk. He was haggard, mumbling, apologizing for coming without a surprise basket.

“Where is your mother?”

“She’s at the shop.”

“She was expecting me.”

His hands were trembling. He was agitated. He found some wine and poured himself a glass.

“Let me teach you a song I learned.”

Caroline didn’t understand all the words, but in the school yard she had heard something naughty about a woman’s belle chose, and he was singing this to her. She remembered him grinning as he sang, enjoying the trick he was playing on her innocence. She refused to learn the song.

“The cuckoo clock—did it ever talk again?” he asked.

She shook her head. “It needed to speak only once. To warn us, to inform us what was going on.”

“What was going on, my petite?”

She prayed for her mother to arrive. Her father, once handsome but now overweight and worn, stood before her with something glinting in his eye that made her afraid. She resolved to shield the two younger ones from this man.

Marshall reached to touch Caroline’s arm, but she didn’t respond to his gesture. She kept talking, as if she had to empty a vessel.

“I don’t know where he is. He went away after my mother died, a few years ago. I felt she died from the strain—not a legitimate wife, all those children, his drunkenness. I think she loved him, but he wouldn’t marry her and she always felt cast aside. So after my mother died, there was no connection, and I did not need to see him again.”

She no longer acknowledged her father, she said, and she had not wanted to answer Marshall’s questions about him.

“How did you and your brothers and sisters support yourselves?” Marshall asked. He rubbed his eyes, as if that would help.

“We had the shop, and my brothers had work. But we did not exist for his family. We do not have his name.”

“How do you have the grocery?”

“He gave the épicerie to my mother long before. She made it a beautiful place.”

“Your father wasn’t all bad, if he gave her the store.”

“I recall the terrible times.”

Caroline turned her head aside, then bent over the dog and stroked him.

“I’m sorry,” Marshall said.

Then, for a while they sat together silently. Marshall tried to sort out what he had heard. Robert had spiraled downward—but why? In 1944 he had seemed so capable. What had he seen and done after Marshall knew him?

“The war …,” he said. But then he could find no more words. He wasn’t sure what he wanted to say.


ON THE WALK to the Métro, he felt empty and hard-hearted. Caroline hadn’t insisted that he stay, but she seemed disappointed. She had grown up in a divided home, not an easy thing. When they had said goodbye, with a quick double peck, he wasn’t sure he would see her again. She gave him a small, wan wave as he left her door and turned toward the stairs.

He waited at a crosswalk for the light to change. Ahead, the neon green cross of the pharmacy was blinking, as if wounded.

The train was due in two minutes, and riders were gathering on the platform, many dressed for late-night shifts. Marshall sat on a bench, his mind dulled. The train arrived, disgorging a motley batch of people. Marshall slipped wearily into a vacant window seat, and as the train twisted through the deep tunnel he gazed through the glass at dark, grimy tiles and thick, snaky wires.