The Girl in the Blue Beret

35.



IT FELT GOOD TO HANDLE A VEHICLE AGAIN. FROM THE TRAIN station at Angoulême, in a boxy Citroën with a balky choke, he headed toward Cognac, an affluent town near the Atlantic coast. After Angoulême, the expanse of vineyards opened out—the grapevines responsible for cognac, the fine brandy that Marshall never drank but that was plentiful in the dollhouse bottles served to airline passengers. The vines were in full growth, twisting and hugging close together, supported by wires and pruned at the top into flat hedge roofs. Grapes. How did anyone take an interest in something so specific and yet so broad? Of course he knew that for the workers vineyards were like the coal mines—not a choice, usually, just an ineluctable fate.

He was afraid she wouldn’t really remember him from 1944. In a brief conversation on the telephone the day before, she had been cordial, and although he still pictured her as the girl in his memory, her voice was high-pitched and unfamiliar.

Following the directions she had given him, he left the main route to Cognac and drove south a few miles to the sign for her village. It was a small farming community, with no trace of commerce or wealth. Slowly, he followed several turns until he found the street, then parked at #4, a large wooden portal, arched at the top. There was a smaller door with a bell rope. After pulling the bell and hearing its distant interior clang, he glanced around. It was a quiet street, like a back alley. He saw a field and a couple of gardens. Opposite, a lone white dog paced inside a fence.

A young woman wearing an apron and carrying a rake appeared at the door. Mme Bouyer was expecting him, she told him as she let him in. A large, regal brown dog appeared, barking until the woman quieted him. The dog sniffed Marshall’s hand, then bowed gracefully.

Marshall was in a large courtyard, enclosed by several small buildings joined together. At the far end was a two-story stone house, covered with large-leaved ivy. The walkway was stone.

“Watch your step, monsieur.”

The buildings seemed disused, the courtyard a bit shabby. Bees buzzed through the thick ivy, and a bird flew out of it as Marshall approached the house. The place seemed to be a run-down farm, in the process of renovation. Gardening implements, a wheelbarrow, and various storage bins were scattered about the courtyard. Two men were working with a pile of stones. The woman with the rake rapped on a door of rough wood, leading off the terrace. Then she moved toward the workers and began to rake the gravel of the driveway.

When Annette opened the door he did not know her right away. Her features had filled out, and her figure was mature. She gave him an enthusiastic three-cheek kiss—left, right, left. He bent to her, her soft cheek pressing his lightly. Her scent was something fresh, an herb of some kind, he thought, not the cloying sweetness of perfume.

“Do you really remember me?” he said, employing his best French.

“Of course I do! But we never knew if you returned home safely.” She spoke in English.

He hung his head slightly, and she touched his arm. He tried to explain—the war was over. He went back to the States. Flying. Not a letter writer—and he didn’t know where to write her.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said, dismissing the subject with a wave.

Her manner and her clothing—a long-sleeved blouse, long pants, and sturdy brown shoes—were unpretentious. Her medium-length waved hair was still dark brown and lustrous. He could see her mother in her lively eyes, her delicate eyebrows. She wore her age well, he thought. She was attractive.

A great smile broke over Annette’s face as she stepped back to survey him.

“The first pilot who appeared at our apartment in Paris was such a surprise. I came home from school one afternoon, and there at the table, eating some soup, was an enormous boy, a young man, with blue eyes and blond hair. I thought at first—a German!”

“The Gestapo dropped in for tea?” Marshall said, laughing.

“He was an American! My first American. I was entranced. I have forgotten his name. He stayed only one night. Of course I wanted to know everything about him, and all about America. I was smitten! He was an aviateur, and his plane had crashed, and my parents were hiding him. And so it began. And then, one day, you.” She smiled.

Her vibrancy was what he remembered.

“You have a fine head of hair,” she said. “And the gray sides are so distinguished.”

Reaching, she touched his hair. Then, turning, she led him into the house, through a small hallway to a dining room.

“Champagne first,” she said. “It is necessary.”

She had the bottle waiting, in ice, on a small side table, and he volunteered to pop the cork, even though he was unaccustomed to the task. It worked, to his relief. The bottle didn’t spew, like those in the movies, and he hoped she wasn’t disappointed.

“Let’s not have it here,” she said, smiling. “Let’s sit on the terrace. We must toast to our reunion.”

Details of her appearance began to fall into place for him. Her teeth—the lower canine that jutted out at a slight angle, the uncommonly even uppers. He had forgotten them until this moment.

“Do you live here with your family?” he asked, after they were settled on the stone terrace in sling-backed deck chairs, separated by a small, lopsided table covered with a blue print cloth. The dog settled near her chair.

“My son is often here on weekends. My mother comes from Normandy when she is able, or I go there. She lives near Saint Lô. My daughter lives in Cognac and is here almost every day, but she is in Saint Lô now with her children. I will join them later this week for Maman’s birthday.”

“I remember your parents so well,” he said.

She nodded, smiling faintly.

“They were like parents to me,” he continued. The champagne almost made him sneeze. “Your mother is in good health?”

“Yes, she is well. I would like for her to move here from Normandy. Saint Lô is too far.” She turned her head away. “But my father—oh, he died many years ago.”

“I’m sorry. He was a good man.”

“Oui.”

Marshall hesitated. He said, “I remember him cursing the boches!”

She smiled. “My mother will be very happy to know I have seen you.”

“I remember how kind she was,” Marshall said.

Annette lifted her glass. “You remembered me as the girl in the blue beret,” she said. “This is what Monsieur Albert told me. Is it not so? But our signals varied. Sometimes I wore a Scottish scarf. One of the aviateurs wrote me, and he remembered me as the girl in the red socks! The beret was a thing I had to wear to school.”

He laughed. “The girl in the red socks. It doesn’t have the same ring to it.”

“During the war we couldn’t get stockings. We wore socks, usually white or red. Oh, how I hated them.”

The two workmen and the woman with the rake were leaving, and Annette crossed the courtyard to speak with them. Marshall could not hear their words distinctly. She was friendly with them, and he saw them all laughing. He sipped more of the champagne. The workers left, and she rejoined him, apologizing for the interruption.

“The work on this place is without end,” she said, laughing.

“It’s very grand,” he said. “I’m surprised to find that you’re a country woman now. You knew Paris so well.”

“My husband and I bought this place twenty years ago. It had been a working farm until 1950, and then it fell into ruin, but we saw the possibilities. This has been a slow, evolving project. We restored the barn and the granary. And the distillerie across the courtyard we made into a food-storage place—like a cold place? For winter? We renovated the house enough to make it livable. Let’s see, we lived in Paris until 1960, but his family is of this village, so we bought this. Oh, it is not luxury, I can tell you truly.” She laughed. “No central heating until about ten years ago. We had only the fireplaces. And you remember from the apartment in Paris what it was like with no heat, or maybe a few lumps of coal for that stove we had in the front room. I remember in Paris when there was no heat at all.” She seemed to shiver.

“Pardon me for asking, but where is your husband?”

“He is no more. Maurice was a veterinarian. He had his practice over there, in what was once the granary.” She pointed across the courtyard to the center building. “He was very happy here. He had his animals, his treatment rooms, his kennels.”

“What happened to him? Or am I out of line?”

She set her face, erasing her radiating smile lines. “It was an accident. Kicked by a horse. The hard shoe hit his skull in the most vulnerable place.” With a flash of anger, she said, “He took chances. He was the type of person who could walk into the middle of a dogfight—or thought he could—and stop it. He was so used to working with animals that he thought they trusted him. He thought he could reason with them.” She shook her head sadly.

“I’m sorry.” Marshall murmured what he hoped were the appropriate comments. “How long ago?” he asked.

“Five years in November. It didn’t have to happen, but it did. I can accept it. That is that. Some things happen that are neither just nor unjust. They are part of the nature of the universe.”

Marshall noticed that she had blamed her husband for his fate while deciding on the indifference of the universe. But there was nothing to argue.

“So you have a daughter and a son?” he asked.

Her face lit up again. For some time, she spoke proudly of the accomplishments of her children and the joys of her small grandchildren. He liked the way she used her hands so expressively as she talked. They were like little ballet dancers.

“And you, Marshall? Please tell me everything.”

Marshall told her about his career and his family, trying not to dwell on the disappointment over retirement. As he told about Loretta, Annette reacted sympathetically, then poured him some more champagne.

“Were you happy?” she asked.

“I thought we were.” He paused, wondering what to say. “But after she died, I’ve been asking myself what that meant—to be happy.”

“You go through self-examination, I know. When someone dies, you start rearranging everything. It’s what we have to do, and you are behind. I’m ahead of you.”

She gazed directly into his eyes. He moved his glass around on the wobbly table.

In a swoop, he told her how his retirement had led him back to the crash site and then to France, in search of the people who had helped him during the war.

“And I am here!” She clapped her hands and laughed gaily.

Her sweetness, her vitality, had survived the years.


WHEN SHE EXCUSED HERSELF, he sat there in a champagne buzz. A bird stirred in the ivy, and a light breeze made the ivy vibrate. He felt as though he were inside a network of ivy, throbbing. He saw the dog rise, turn around, then settle down again. Nearby, a striped gray cat was washing its face.

Annette brought a tray of cake and chocolate, with a pot of tea.

After she had arranged their plates and poured the tea, he asked her how she became involved in guiding airmen through the streets of Paris.

“Oh, I am delighted to tell you this. My parents were outraged by the Occupation. Every evening there was intense political discussion, and I heard all of it. They were fervent Gaullists—that is, for France. And Charles de Gaulle—appropriately named!—was the symbol of France.”

Annette’s smile broke out. “It was easy to play the innocent schoolgirl, and it was amusing to confound the Germans. They tried to treat the schoolgirls with politeness. If you were on the train and they wanted to sit, you were supposed to stand and let them sit, so one always took the opportunity to make that difficult. When they asked for directions, we liked to send them the wrong way. Once, an officer was looking for Napoléon’s Tomb, and I sent him to the Père Lachaise! And when they weren’t looking I liked to draw the Croix de Lorraine everywhere—you know, the symbol of the Free French.

“Then in 1943, my parents began working for the réseau Bourgogne. You must understand that at the time people in the Résistance didn’t know there was a Résistance beyond two or three names. We had no way of knowing how extensive the network was, or even if it was succeeding, but my parents believed they had to do something, and this was a way to be résistant without violence.

“Then I began to participate as a courrier. I took the train to friends in Versailles and brought back tracts for clandestine distribution. I hid them inside my schoolbook bindings and inside the seams of my book sack—my vache. I found this little job very thrilling. I grew more serious then, and I was more careful about teasing the Germans.”


ALL AFTERNOON MARSHALL and Annette continued to catch up on their lives and to reminisce about wartime. After the war, she taught school in Paris, and later in Cognac; her children had married well; her sister, Monique, taught music in Paris. Annette’s manner was warm, filled with laughter. He felt at ease with her. He could sit there indefinitely.

Eventually, he couldn’t help asking about Robert. He told her about searching for him through Caroline and recognizing him in her box of photos.

“I remembered him so well, but that story seems to have a sad ending.”

Annette nodded. “Yes. Robert is a sad story. I can’t settle that in my mind. But yes, the time he worked with us in the Bourgogne—that was a challenge for all of us.”

“Is he still alive?”

“I assume so. But I do not know where he is at present.”

“I always pictured him out on daring missions for the Resistance,” Marshall said. “I imagined him having secret meetings with saboteurs.”

“Oh, no. He was only a convoyeur for the pilots,” she said. “The Bourgogne line strictly limited itself to helping the aviateurs. Robert’s parents were grocers, and they were forced to supply the Germans, but Robert was able to get food from them to help us feed the aviateurs.”

“His daughter should know this,” Marshall said.

“It was very risky, but we depended on him. He probably was your escort on the train.”

“My memories are vague, but yes, I think he led me south from Paris. He seemed so mysterious, like he was involved in major operations.”

“There was no mystery about Robert. He was too much not mysterious, truly. I always trembled for him. He was often in danger.”

“Tell me about him.”

Hesitating, she offered him another piece of chocolate instead. Marshall was afraid he was asking for too much information, but then she began, slowly.

“At first, he made the false ID papers for the aviateurs. We fed the evaders and hid them for a short while, and then he escorted them on the train to Perpignan, where they would cross the Pyrenees with a local guide. But one day Robert arrived at our door, desperate and anxious. He had been arrested on his return from Perpignan. The French police on the train became suspicious of his papers.”

“Did he carry a fake ID for himself?” Marshall asked.

“Oh, yes. As you know, all young French men—age twenty to twenty-four—were sent off to the work camps in Germany. He was about twenty-one, but he contrived to look older.

“That day he arrived to us, badly shaken.

“ ‘Hide me,’ he said. ‘I was arrested!’

“ ‘But how did you escape?’ asked Maman.

“ ‘I jumped from the train down the embankment. But no one shot at me. I took two different trains until at last I arrived here.’

“The French police had kept his papers. He was disturbed, but he hadn’t lost his courage. He thought the police had let him go in spite of their suspicions. That happened sometimes, even with the Germans. Once he and my father were escorting aviateurs from Belgium, and he noticed that the German police seemed to recognize that there were aviateurs with them. But then the Germans looked the other way! Maybe it was too much trouble to arrest them. Or maybe it was only that they were looking forward to their beer and sausage. Still, it was all very dangerous.

“After Robert’s misadventure, the chief of the Bourgogne stopped him from going to Perpignan. He instructed Robert to bring the identity-card equipment to our apartment, and my mother began to make the false papers, as she did when you were there. Then I began guiding aviateurs to the photomaton at the Louvre to get the photos for the false identities.

“That is when I began going with Robert to escort aviateurs coming down from the north. We would meet them at the Gare du Nord and guide them to their shelter family, then later we put them on the train at the Gare d’Austerlitz for their southern journey. I went on Friday afternoons, after school.”

Marshall said, “When I was trying to find you, I started thinking how amazing it was that a young girl would be out on such a dangerous mission.”

She laughed. “Oh, there were many occasions that could have been the end! Once, we were with a group of five aviateurs at the Gare du Nord, when we passed five others at the stairs to the street! We recognized they were Americans by their large boots and, of course, their height. We didn’t dare acknowledge them, and our group had been instructed not to notice anyone, not to respond or react. What a job! The aviateurs did not always take it seriously, and the Americans were likely to produce their chewing gum—mon Dieu! Or ask for a fire for a cigarette. Oh, they weren’t stupid, but we had to teach them not to smoke in public! You remember that.”

“A Yank is a Yank,” he said, laughing. “It’s hard for us to wise up.”

“The Germans did not always pay attention. I think they were just happy to be in Paris. They thought they had already won the war. The French police were more likely to notice the large boots. When Robert and I went north on the trains—what chances we took! It was an advantage to behave as a romantic couple—flirting, holding hands. We weren’t suspected. Oh, I had a petit penchant for him, bien sûr—”

She paused, gazing at a bird rippling the ivy. “Robert … It’s very sad.”


LATER, AFTER THE CHAMPAGNE had worn off, she suggested a walk.

“Do you ride?”

“Ride?”

“I have horses.”

They walked outside the courtyard to see the horses.

“My son and I hike,” she said. “Sometimes my daughter. And all of us ride, so I keep their horses here with mine. My husband always had horses. You noticed the chickens. There used to be a goat, a donkey, a pony, all kinds of wounded things that we rehabilitated. An owl used to live in the rafters over the terrace, but I have not seen any owls there in three years.”

They walked down the street to the small field where the three horses grazed. The dog came with them, playfully running ahead.

“Bernard,” she called after him. “Don’t be a child.”

“I’ve never been on a horse,” Marshall admitted.

“You wanted Pegasus,” she said, smiling. “But is it true you are not permitted to fly anymore?”

“Not on the airlines. I could rent a plane and tool around. Or I could buy a plane if I had the money. But the airline tells me I’m too old to fly for them.”

“But you must fly! If you rent a plane, I will go with you! You must not give up what you love.”

He grinned, immediately imagining the two of them on a sky jaunt, performing barrel rolls and nose-dives. The horses had come running to her, and she held out some carrots for them. She stroked them and called them by name—Peppy and Fifi and Charleroi, or something similar-sounding. Marshall enjoyed watching her caress the horses. She was more than fifty years old now, but she still seemed youthful. She had ample, well-formed breasts, and her skin was smooth and fresh.

They walked down a road to the river, passing stone dwellings that could have been there for centuries. The vegetation was thick along the side of the road, and gardens were bursting with tomatoes and squashes. It had been a long time since he had paid attention to anyone’s garden. His grandmother had grown vegetables in the holler below the mountain, and he remembered her singing as she worked her slanted patch of ground. He remembered her shelling a basket of beans.

Blackberries grew in profusion by the side of the road. “My grandmother picked wild blackberries in the mountains of Kentucky,” he said. “I picked them too when I visited in the summer, but I had to be forced to do it. I loved to eat them though.” He laughed, as if he were unfamiliar to himself.

“These are not ripe yet,” Annette said. “Oh, look.”

Resting on a blackberry leaf was an unusual brown-and-yellow butterfly with ovoid wings.

“I have always loved these butterflies,” she said.

“I don’t think we have that kind in America.”

“A butterfly is born to fly, just as you were,” she said, smiling up at him. “But the butterfly flutters and takes its time to see the sights.”

“It doesn’t burn jet fuel,” he said. He remembered once flying through a swarm of butterflies during a takeoff. A flash of color, a cloud, gone before he truly saw it.

They passed a field of what appeared to be corn. “It grows nicely,” she remarked.

She called out some greetings to a man and a boy fishing from the riverbank. “They bring me fish sometimes,” she said.

They walked on, making idle observations. He didn’t want to go back to Paris. He could sleep behind her armoire, he thought.


SHE INVITED HIM to return the next day. After that, she would be in Normandy with her family for a week. She recommended a modest hotel in Cognac, on a street of ancient stone structures. After checking in, Marshall walked around in the fading light. Cognac seemed both ritzy and ruined. At a sidewalk café he ate a fish of some kind, just off the boat. He didn’t want any wine. A light rain fell briefly, then cleared.

He managed to sleep in the hot, tattered room above the hotel bar, and the next morning he read the newspaper in the cramped breakfast room. The United States seemed remote, caught up in provincial political squabbles. He would be happy to get rid of Jimmy Carter—the jerk still hadn’t gotten the hostages out of Iran—but electing an actor seemed far-fetched. There were few details on the election campaign, so he devoted himself to a great deal of information about the upcoming Olympics. In his mind he was with Annette. Her youthful purity had lasted with her, but her womanliness surprised him. No husband. A preposterous coincidence, he thought.

He went for a walk along some narrow streets. On the main boulevard two girls on bicycles, baguettes in their baskets, whipped past him. He could almost feel the warm breath of the freshly baked bread as they went by. A fast car passed him from behind, the sound of its horn trailing in its wake.