The Girl in the Blue Beret

4.



MARSHALL HAD WANTED TO SNEAK OUT OF THE AIRPORT, but the crew waylaid him with a brief farewell ceremony of plaudits and pranks. The purser gave him a teddy bear dressed in a pioneer flight suit, complete with goggles and a little leather helmet.

“Sure you got all your paperwork done, Marshall?” a junior pilot asked, kidding.

“I’ll have nightmares about that,” Marshall said.

“That’s the thing. More time on paperwork than jiggling the yoke.”

“Aviation has gotten so bureaucratic that even us superheroes have trouble,” Marshall said. He had perfected an avuncular chuckle as a filler for idle conversation.

It was always strange to enter a new decade, he thought as he closed his logbook. It was as if you were allowed for a moment into the workings of time before easing back into the usual steady pace of life. The disbelief that greeted a new decade was a defense against disappearance. Perhaps after he had passed the hurdle of the new decade, the dread would even out and he would simply continue his life. He had imagined retirement as a looming wall, with a lawn chair parked in front, but now he did a little skip at the end of the escalator, a spontaneous grace note of anticipation. Screw the airline.

For the first time in years, he wasn’t required to drop off his passport at the scheduling office.

He found his Honda Civic, its silvery gray like an emblem of age, and drove home as if on autopilot. He always found that the wheel-clutching demands of driving a mere automobile were minor trifles. On the four-lanes he could zip around lumbering trucks and keep the accelerator even, but on streets, with their stop signs and intermittent shopping strips, he grew inattentive.

“I hope you don’t fly that plane the way you’re driving this car,” Loretta had said once. Most of the time she pretended his driving was like Apollo at the reins of his chariot.

As he passed the garbage mountain near Rahway, glittering with green glass, he remembered Loretta saying it sparkled like the aquamarine of the Mediterranean Sea. It’s garbage, he pointed out. His career had liberated him from the kind of work done by most men. He couldn’t imagine himself driving a bulldozer, sculpting refuse. He ascended, bursting through the cloud layers, rising, rising, scooting through the atmosphere, leveling off at thirty-six thousand feet. The jets, the bumping through clouds, the speed—it was like sex, with much more at stake. Sometimes he imagined he could just keep rising until he reached the moon. He thought now about the time, just before Apollo 11, when Neil Armstrong was practicing on the flying-bedstead lunar trainer, a framework contraption that hovered. The thing went kerflooie, spun out of control, and Armstrong hit the eject button at the last possible millisecond. Matter-of-factly, he parachuted to the ground, shucked the chute, and was back at his desk in thirty minutes. He didn’t even mention the incident to his office mate. Just another day on the job.


ALTHOUGH BASED AT JFK, Marshall lived in New Jersey. From the air, the landscape made sense to him, but on the ground the suburbs were a meaningless hodgepodge of deadpan houses and noxious shopping centers. Loretta had flourished in the suburbs. She knew the neighborhood of the school and the streets where she took Albert and Mary to harp and flute lessons when they were growing up. Yet she remained devoted to Cincinnati, her hometown, and she had gone there often, with the children, even after her parents were dead. His own parents died long ago, and he had lost touch with all other kin in Cincinnati and down in the Kentucky mountains.

The Stones’ house was a two-story, green-clapboard colonial hedged with boxwood. The interior was feminine throughout, except for his wood-paneled study, with its somber barometer and photographs of DC-3s and the beloved old Connie—the Constellation, the most satisfying airplane he had ever flown. He had always been like a special guest in this house, someone who dropped in every week or so. Loretta played her part as hostess. Home life had an air of pretense, as if staged. When he was away, did she strike the set?

Whenever he thought about his role in the family when the kids were young, he teetered off balance. What a fraud he was! What did he know about parenting? He was the dad who took the children to get the Christmas tree, the dad who carved the turkey, the dad who drove the station wagon on summer vacations. On holidays when he had to be away, Loretta simply shifted the date. The turkey waited. Santa too.

Loretta greeted him sunnily each time he returned. The transition was disorienting. In an airplane, he was perpetually alert, energized, a cat watching a mouse hole. On the ground, his real self floated away. Home was a maze of costumes and allowances and bicycle tires. He stayed in his den for hours on end, absorbed in the ancient Mayans or Viking explorers or Georges Simenon mysteries—in French. He read anything he could get his hands on. He jogged around the high-school track.

Yet he had held fast to the contract. This home life in New Jersey was what all the sacrifices were for—the training, the war, the job. His nuclear unit ensconced in this fine colonial two-story was his raison d’être. He had no complaint. As a 747 captain, he was a success, and his family was proud of him.

Now Marshall entered the deserted house, carried his bags up to the den, hung his uniform jacket in the closet, and set his hat on its accustomed shelf. The scrambled-egg brim of the hat seemed to be saying something, but he shut the door on its grin. He opened his carry-on bag and pulled out the gift teddy bear by the paw. Its ridiculous little flight suit made a mockery of him. He threw it into the closet, where it landed among a jumble of shoes.

At his base in England, in his leather flying jacket, he had jokingly called himself the Scourge of the Sky. Then he met those deadly Focke-Wulfs. He had always felt anguish over the loss of the bomber. A B-17 cost a million dollars, big money back then. And it cost forty thousand dollars to train a pilot. That he didn’t get to fly more missions was like a cruel coitus interruptus. He had never gotten over that disappointment.

He sat in his den, the most comfortable place in the empty house. A tape ran backwards in his mind. His final airline flight, and before that, embarrassing himself in the field in Belgium, and long before that, crash-landing in that field. Once again, he peered through the B-17’s windscreen as he brought the bomber in. The Belgians seemed fixated on the memory of the plane coming down in their field, so close it could have plowed into their church.

Now something had shaken loose. The distant past was no longer behind him, something to be shoved behind while he forged ahead; now it was in front of him.


HE HAD TO FIGURE out what to do with the house. Sell it? Turn it over to his kids? He didn’t want to rent it out. That could be a disaster. He wanted to ask Albert to live there, but he doubted Albert would take care of it. Albert’s idea of upkeep was giving himself a biannual hair trim. The house needed some repairs. Loretta had always cautioned against letting the house become an eyesore in the neighborhood. It was on the verge. Marshall sprang into action. The day after his final flight he hired some odd-job guys who promised to come at the end of the month to work on the gutters and windows.

For several days he reviewed the war. In the mornings, he dashed through the Times crossword and went for brisk walks in the neighborhood, or he jogged around the track. On his birthday he ordered a pizza, and when it was delivered he was surprised to see that the sun was setting. He hadn’t opened the drapes all day. He had been absorbed in a history of the Mighty Eighth Air Force and was especially engrossed in the section on the Hell’s Angels, his bomb group.

He ate the pizza while watching a TV special about Hollywood’s early days. Nothing else was on.

During the next few days he plunged into his aviation library—the flight magazines and books, the videotapes, the clippings. He would get lost in the forties. He found Loretta’s big-band albums and played several of them straight through. As he listened to Artie Shaw’s ecstatic “Frenesi,” he realized that he knew every note by heart. He recalled days when he was waiting to ship out, when he and Loretta were sharing Cokes on silly, frenetic dates, or jitterbugging to the music of Blue Barron and his orchestra at the Castle Farms ballroom in Cincinnati. The yearning notes of Doris Day singing “Sentimental Journey” brought to mind the end of the war, when he married Loretta.

He kept the music going while he pored over maps of Occupied Europe and books about the air campaign against Hitler. He traced the route of his B-17’s last mission. He traced his route from Belgium to Paris.

He remembered an afternoon in Paris in 1944 when bunches of daffodils arrived in a bicycle basket from the country. Coming out of his long hiding, he saw flowering bushes in the park, and even though he had rarely given thought to flowers except for knowing that women liked them, he knew at once that the dancing floral displays amidst the sickly swastikas and dull green uniforms were a defiant sign of hope. He remembered seeing the girl rest her nose in the trumpet of a daffodil.


HIS DAUGHTER, MARY, had called on his birthday, and now she was calling again, checking on how the retirement was going. He had not mentioned his plans.

“I’ve been thinking,” she said. “Is there anything I can do?”

“What?”

“Is there anything you need?”

“Don’t worry about me.”

“Well, Albert and I are both worried.”

“Why?”

“Well, if you don’t have flying—”

“Afraid I’ll go off the deep end?”

“Listen to me,” she said sternly. He could hear her talking to her dolls—a scene from twenty years ago. “If you don’t have flying, what will you do?”

“I’m brushing up on my French,” he said.

“Say something to me in French.”

“Tu es une bonne fille.”

“A good girl?” She sighed.

“A good daughter.”

He waited for her to say he was a good father. He told himself she was trying to think of the French word and had drawn a blank.

Marshall regarded his children with mingled awe, amusement, respect, and alarm. He knew young people were headstrong, and he had intentionally granted his children the freedom to go their own ways. He had been an arrogant youth himself—stubborn, always butting heads with authority. Mary worked on a newspaper in Boise, Idaho, and Albert was still unsettled, working part-time in Manhattan while studying for his second master’s degree—first math, now design. They never told him much.

He never told them much either, but now he told Mary about his visit to the crash site and his notion of going to live in Europe for a while.

“I’d like to retrace the trail I took through France in ’44,” he said.

“That’s neat, Dad. A little trip to the past. That could be fun.”

The conversation came to a standstill. Marshall realized he was kicking at the doorstop between the kitchen and the dining room—a weighted, fabric pioneer girl with a churn. He said to Mary, “Your mom would kick me across the room if she could see what sad shape her churn-girl is in.”

Mary laughed. “Throw that thing out, Dad. It’s probably breeding germs.”


ALBERT AGREED IMMEDIATELY to house-sit. He could come the first of June, when his rent was due, he said when Marshall telephoned. Marshall hadn’t been able to figure out how else to find an occupant, and he knew Albert had little money. As an inducement, he threw in use of the car as part of the deal. But when Marshall stressed the need to look after the place and make any necessary repairs, Albert hesitated.

“I’ll pay the expenses,” Marshall said.

Albert had a contrary streak. He always resisted if Marshall made any demands. Albert had been a rebellious kid, and by his college years he was, in Marshall’s view, a hippie protester. Marshall was always thankful that Albert had gotten a deferment during the Vietnam War. But it separated him further from his son. Their experiences had been so different.

“You O.K., Dad? Are you O.K. with the retirement?”

“I’m dandy,” Marshall said.

After they hung up, Marshall reflected that both Albert and Mary had expressed concern for him. He was annoyed but also grateful. They were good kids, really. Maybe he and Loretta hadn’t done such a bad job.

His mind zipped back to the year when Loretta was first pregnant. She had done up her hair in a wavy mass that was supposed to imitate Hedy Lamarr’s rolling tresses in White Cargo.

Loretta said, “You can name the boy, and I get to name the girl.”

That was the plan. A boy and a girl. And it worked out. Albert was first. Loretta liked the name Marshall chose.

“Is Albert a name in your family?” she asked.

“No. It’s just a name I’m fond of,” Marshall said. He added, “It’s a name for courage.”

When the girl came along, Loretta announced that the name would be Mary. “I’m naming her for you,” she said.

“I don’t know how you twisted Mary out of Marshall,” he said.


IN A PLACE NORTH OF PARIS, a man and his wife dressed in dark, loose clothing were hovering over a radio, listening for a coded message from the BBC. In a corner, the boy was reading his lessons.

The message came, and the boy translated it for him. Blue tit birds will be nesting at twilight. Marshall could not make sense of it.

But the couple raised their heads, triumphant and tense. There was a bottle of wine on a worn wooden table, and a cat curled indifferently by the fire.

The boy’s father, Pierre Albert, disappeared into the night. A long two hours later, a muffled boom sounded in the north, and from the dark backyard Marshall could see in the distance a blaze erupting bright enough to show its angry smoke.