The Girl in the Blue Beret

38.



PARIS WAS WARM AND MUGGY. THE SKY FELT CLOSE, THE AIR HEAVY with coming rain. A storm cloud was like a piñata waiting for thunder to whack it, Marshall thought, but he knew that thunderstorms were infrequent in Paris, so he walked to his apartment from the Gare Montparnasse with his small duffel. He told himself he was getting in shape for his hike with Annette, but the weight unbalanced his shoulders, and he began to wish he had taken a taxi. He arrived at his apartment sweaty and feeling lopsided.

Marshall was moving around his own apartment as if exploring it. The bedroom was stuffy, so he pulled open the windows and leaned toward the street. Children on the playground were hurrying away as large drops of rain began to fall. The dark, heavy shadows of pigeons rushed past the windows. He could feel the breeze pick up.

He closed the windows halfway, and the rain splashed against them while he read his mail. Al Grainger had written again, suggesting a crew reunion at the crash site in Belgium. “It was my wife’s idea, and I have to say she was right on target. After what you wrote about going back there and meeting those people, it just seems right to go and thank them in a proper way. And we could have a great time seeing each other, catching up, reminiscing. Couldn’t we round up all the surviving crew? Their families could come too.”

O.K., but no preaching, Marshall felt like replying. He tended to answer letters in his head instead of on paper. Marshall the Procrastinator. Thirty-six years.

After the rain let up, he telephoned Nicolas and reported on his trip.

“Marshall, maybe I have found the house where you stayed before we sheltered you in Chauny.”

“The women in black?”

“Yes. I don’t know if any are alive, but there is a daughter.”

“Good work, Nicolas.”

Marshall thanked him and agreed to come to Chauny for Sunday lunch after he returned from his hike with Annette.

Later, he telephoned Mary and found himself confiding that he had located an “interesting” woman who had been a girl when he came through during the war.

“Her family took care of me when I passed through Paris back then,” he told his daughter. “Now I’ve looked her up, and we had a good time reminiscing.”

He couldn’t continue. He was thinking of Loretta. “A good time” perhaps wasn’t the right phrase.

“Dad, it’s O.K. if you have some women friends.”

“Thank you. Your old dad is still alive and kicking.”

“That reminds me—I heard that Albert has a girlfriend! I was blown away. Don’t tell him I told you.”

“That’s good news,” Marshall said. “I always thought it would just take time. Maybe this one will work out.”

“That’s what I thought,” said Mary, with only the slightest hesitation in her voice.

“How about you, Mary?”

“I’ve been going out with a guy at the college—an economist. He’s really interesting, and he has some theories about inflation that baffle me.”

“Well, let me know if you find out what causes it. How about this—I’m planning to go hiking, and I’m going to buy hiking boots tomorrow.”

“Well, far out, Dad!”

“I guess so. But it was never my ambition to become an old fuddy-duddy, you know. I can still get around.”

She laughed. “Remember how you and Mom would take us for picnics at a state park when we were kids? Nobody thought of going hiking in those days, but I’ve gotten more interested in fitness. Everybody has. Maybe we can go to a park again sometime. We could go hiking this time.”

“Well, let’s do that,” Marshall said. “I’ll have the boots for it, anyway!”


MARSHALL, COMFORTABLE IN PARIS NOW, no longer carried his cash in a safety pouch on his leg. He gazed at the window display at the Everything Store: fishhooks, a cheese grater, a doll made of seashells, and a Hemingway novel with a faded cover.

“Bonjour, monsieur l’Américain! Ça va?”

“Je vais bien, merci. And you, Guy?”

“Comme-ci, comme-ça. How does your search go?”

“Ah, Guy, I’ve found her. I was looking in the wrong place. She was in the Charentes!” Briefly, he told of his visit with Annette and the hike they planned together.

“A rendez-vous for a randonnée,” Guy said, smiling.

“Exactly so!” Marshall fingered some leather bags hanging from the wall. “I’m looking for a backpack, a small one for hiking.”

Guy produced a leather rucksack that resembled something a mountain climber of the nineteenth century would carry. The French farmers in 1944 carried such rucksacks, slung over their shoulders. Robert Lebeau had one. Marshall had one himself, holding his meager supplies on the train out of Paris.

“I’d prefer something more modern, Guy.”

“More American, you want to say.”

Guy revealed a cheap blue zippered pack that seemed suitable. Marshall paid and made small talk about his trip to the Charentes. Then he remembered that he needed a curtain of some kind to keep out the streetlights. For some time he examined the crop of dusty bamboo blinds that Guy offered. They had been kept for perhaps decades behind a rolled-up Turkish carpet.

“They look ancient,” Marshall said.

“Mais oui.” Guy began rummaging excitedly through some cabinets in the back of the store. He went back and forth searching. Then he found what he was looking for, a roll of dark fabric.

“This was to line the curtains, to shut out the light. I am surprised myself to find this. Maybe it is left from the wartime, because people couldn’t afford to buy it.”

“Exactly what I want.”

“You will keep the light inside at night, Marshall. And in the day the sun will stay away.”

Marshall flicked dust from the black roll. “I hope you’re not charging antique prices.”

Guy shrugged. “For you, just what it’s worth.”

“I’ll try it,” Marshall said. He paid for his purchase, declining to have it wrapped. Laboriously, Guy wrote out a detailed receipt.

“See you next time, Guy. Where do you take your vacation?”

“I go to the Languedoc in August.” Guy shut his cash drawer and straightened some knickknacks on the counter. “My wife likes breathing in the country. That’s what she says—in the country she can breathe. My two sons and daughter and my parents and my wife’s mother and my grandmother come. My brother comes with his family. We’re all there. Bien sûr, there is nothing like having all the family together. We do the picnics, the games. It is bliss!”

Guy’s broad smile made Marshall wistful. He thought of the family picnics Mary had mentioned. The elaborate logistics of the outings had always annoyed him, smothering whatever “bliss” he might have felt.

Walking down the avenue du Général Leclerc, he thought how unlike a Frenchman he was, with his inadequate attention to things that mattered most here—food and wine and family. History, they didn’t dwell on. Sex—well, maybe he could see eye-to-eye with the French on that.

The blackout curtain material was brittle on the edges, but he trimmed it and taped it to the windows. He wasn’t sure it was authentic, but it would do. That night he slept peacefully, and the morning sun was high before he was fully awake.





39.



ANNETTE HAD GIVEN HIM EXPLICIT DIRECTIONS TO THE VARIOUS places where she had guided the aviators, and now in his new hiking boots, he set off to find them. First, he went to Saint-Mandé to see where the Vallons had lived. He had been entirely wrong about the location. The building, made of handsome pale stone blocks, seemed less familiar than the one he had found on his recent walk. Yet there was a vaguely recognizable outline and shape to the neighborhood. Standing across the street, he let himself turn back in time. The entry. The bicycles. The stairs. He identified the window of the room where he had slept, facing the small side street. He remembered waiting hours alone, trying to keep warm by doing jumping jacks—in his socks. The window on the corner was the sitting room, which had a large ornate stove that burned coal, delivered through a chute to the basement. He spotted the chute now. Annette, Monique, and their parents had slept in two rooms on the other side of the sitting room, and when there were additional airmen visiting, the girls moved into their parents’ room. On the street, staring up at the dining room window, he remembered the kitchen beyond it, where Mme Vallon miraculously concocted splendid meals from meager rations. He remembered the goose, the feathers flying.

After studying the building for a while, he had readjusted his memory. It seemed odd to him that memory was so malleable, that what he had thought was true could be revised, like a flight plan.

To break in his hiking boots, he walked toward the Jardin des Plantes, keeping up a good stride along the Seine, passing a variety of scenes—fishermen, industries, laundry. The weather was good, not too hot. The long botanical garden stretched out in front of the Museum of Natural History.

“Go straight past the garden to the grove of Christmas trees,” she had told him just two days earlier.

He passed the statue, Rodin’s Thinker. The guy was still thinking. Marshall recognized the general layout and the area where among the evergreens she had assembled airmen before sending them across the street to the Gare d’Austerlitz. He wandered around through the trees. The path meandered. On a bench by some bushes, an aged man sat reading Le Monde. Marshall sat on another bench to tighten his bootlace. He dimly recalled that Annette had escorted him and a B-17 waist gunner to some benches amidst public shrubbery. Later, she had distributed their train tickets surreptitiously, without speaking. The last time Marshall saw her, she was hurrying away down the broad avenue of plane trees. He had thought he remembered how the sunshine dappled teasingly through the great trees lining the promenades. It was spring. But now he realized he must have been here near dusk. He had taken the night train to Toulouse.

The Gare d’Austerlitz was across the street from the Jardin des Plantes. Marshall made his way there, passing the Métro stairs and entering the massive building. The high glass-and-wrought-iron ceiling was so distinctive that he did not see how he could have forgotten the station. He could almost locate in his spatial memory the exact quai where he had boarded the train. Robert had entered the car without glancing at him. So many memories were crashing through Marshall’s head that reliving them made him exultant—the fear then, the relief now.

On the way out of the station, he remembered what Nicolas had said about the Gare d’Austerlitz. The Jews were deported from this spot. Marshall was glad the Dirty Lily had dropped at least a few bombs. If he hadn’t been shot down, maybe he could have helped shorten the war. If, if only. You couldn’t revise history with conditional clauses.

He pictured the blithe young man he had been—reckless but scared, overconfident, out of his element, filled with longings, strangely detached from home, walking tentatively in a foreign country. He reflected upon his youthful brazenness, his naïveté. He wondered if Annette found her youth embarrassing too. Maybe the primary difference between youth and adulthood was the capacity for embarrassment.