The Girl in the Blue Beret

by Bobbie Ann Mason

  —Top turret opened up, then the waist gunners.

  —The FW raced under them and was gone.

  Wind screamed through the opened fuselage, and the Dirty Lily bucketed and shuddered. Marshall and Webb both grabbed their yokes, fighting a plane almost out of control. Their air speed was dropping dangerously.

  Webb motioned downward. He and Marshall both pushed forward on their yokes. The crippled plane nosed down.

  The top turret gunner called, “I think I got him!”

  Tail gunner: “No, you didn’t.”

  “Al’s hit!” Campanello yelled. His voice was thin and distant in Marshall’s headset. “Shoulder. And me. My leg.”

  Webb yanked the yoke to the right. They pulled through a diving turn, then hauled back. Straining, muscling, Webb and Marshall leveled the bomber at about five hundred feet, maybe less.

  “Bandit, ten o’clock high!” Top turret.

  The guns were hammering again.

  The FW—silver with red markings—raked their port side, nose to tail.

  Hadley, the radio man, called out something that sounded like “running board.”

  Chick Cochran was on the inter-phone from the waist. “We’ve got a fire back here!”

  “Bail out, bail out!” cried Webb.

  “No!” Marshall cried. “Too low!”

  Webb leaned back and reached for his chute pack. Marshall clung to the yoke.

  Marshall called to the crew, “I’m bringing it in.”

  Marshall said to Webb, “It’s my airplane.”

  He saw fields next to a village. He was going straight in. He yelled on the inter-phone for the ball-turret gunner to crawl out.

  They crested a line of trees, then sank toward the dirt. As the plane skidded onto the field, the props ripping the ground, Marshall saw Webb slumped, head resting on his chest as if he had just nodded off for a quick snooze.

  25.

  MARSHALL HAD RARELY TALKED ABOUT THE PLANE GOING down, and he hadn’t told Gordon all of it. He had never felt like taking credit for bringing the plane down safely. Webb was unconscious, perhaps already dead—exactly when, Marshall couldn’t say.

  “An FW-190. A mean fucker,” Gordon was saying.

  Marshall squirmed. “Your father had been hit. He was slumped over by the time we stopped moving.”

  Gordon shook his head. “Damn.” He surveyed the room blankly. “That’s what’s called a bad day,” he said, forcing a laugh. He flexed his fists.

  “Nothing was anybody’s fault,” Marshall said. “Your dad did one hell of a job. Nobody could have done better.”

  Gordon called to the bartender, “Garçon—what do I have to do to get a refill?”

  The bartender raised his eyebrows and turned his back. He made a show of dawdling before bringing the bottle.

  “There’s certain things I’ve got against these Frenchies,” Gordon said to Marshall, after the bartender left. “Why they didn’t do the job in Vietnam. Why they hate us for doing the job they couldn’t do. We saved their ass in the World War Number Two, but they forgot about that. They have convenient memory. I tell this to my wife, and she says, ‘Gordon, you’re like a dog worrying a bone. Bury that bone and let’s go add another garage to the split-level.’ Or some other crap.” He laughed again, apparently struck by his own wit.

  “Have you been married long?” Marshall asked.

  “Linda and I got together after I came back to the States in 1970. Now, that was a bad scene for you, 1970. All those protesters, spitting on GIs coming home.” He swallowed an eye-popping slug of Scotch. “I had some problems with that war from the start, but I did my job. That’s American values.” Webb turned serious. “We had military discipline when I was a boy—lights out, reveille, spit-polish your shoes. When I saw my stepfather in the hall on the way to the goddamn bathroom, I had to salute! He was a career Army man, a colonel. I don’t know when he met Mom.”

  He paused. “Then you see what I did to repay him—joined the Air Force!” Gordon rubbed his hands together. “The One-Oh-Wonder! Man, I was one afterburning bastard.”

  Gordon asked Marshall a few questions about his father then—how he did takeoffs, what he liked to do on his time off. Marshall tried to paint a lively portrait, but he was flummoxed. It was hard to come up with stirring stories about Gordon’s father.

  Then he remembered that he had bicycled into the English countryside with Lawrence Webb and a couple of other crewmates after a tough mission to Bremen. They had made a day of it, biking through peaceful country, racing on flat stretches.

  “He was a speed demon on a bike,” Marshall said. “A One-Oh-Wonder.”

  He declined another drink. After promising Gordon he would be in touch, he left. He walked to his apartment in the early twilight, shedding the alcohol and feeling his eyes grow clear again.

  26.

  HIS MAIL CAME TO HIS APARTMENT NOW. IT ARRIVED IN A locked cubbyhole in the lobby. Mary sent photographs of a trip she had taken to the Olympic Peninsula, and Albert sent drawings of a landscape plan for revising Marshall’s backyard with ground covers. No one would have to mow! he explained. Loretta would have had a fit, Marshall thought. Ground covers bring snakes, she would say.

  He had received a couple more letters from the crew, in answer to his letter about visiting the crash site, and today he heard from Bob Hadley, his erstwhile escape partner. Hadley wrote from California, saying it had never occurred to him to return to the crash site, but he was glad that Marshall was searching for his helpers. Hadley wrote, “I didn’t know the name of the family that sheltered me in Paris. I didn’t stay there long, because everybody was starving in Paris.” He had no reaction to Marshall’s account of the boy’s father who was killed. But he was wondering if Marshall had written to Hootie Williams’s family. Hootie was single, and no one in the crew had kept in touch with his parents. Marshall thought about the Hootie he had known at Molesworth. He could whip the pants off everybody at poker. He could hold his liquor. He could sew. He could probably do magic tricks. Hootie always came up with something unexpected—and the last thing anyone expected was that he would lose his life.

  Marshall opened a small package from Kansas, thinking it was from another of his crewmates, the flight engineer, James Ford. But the writer was James’s daughter, Sonia.

  My father is ill and cannot reply to your letter, but he wanted me to send you this tape recording he made about his experience in France after your plane crashed. It wasn’t until last year, when he was told he had lung cancer, that he decided to make this recording for my brother and me. When he was able to share his account it brought us closer together as a family, and we wouldn’t trade anything for this. I’m a nurse in a psychiatric ward and all I hear all day is far-fetched stories. But this tape tells a story that is both fantastic and true, and it is one I cherish. My mother did not live to hear it, but I have a feeling she did know some of it before she went. Dad sends you his best wishes, and he remembers with gratitude how you pulled him out of the plane.

  Marshall did not remember pulling Ford from the plane. Webb was lying in the dirt. Ford and Marshall together had hauled him out of the plane. Marshall had been over these memories so often that they had become only memories of memories.

  He wrote a brief letter to Sonia Ford. He tried to remember if Ford was a smoker. They all were. He couldn’t listen to the tape recording until he added a tape recorder to his Parisian furnishings. But maybe he didn’t want to hear another version of the tale. The rendezvous with Gordon Webb had been unnerving, and it was playing in his mind still.

  He was settling into his new, perhaps temporary, life. He made small talk with the grocer, the laundress, the butcher, the guy named Guy at the Everything Store. He tried to remember to carry a string bag for his purchases. The baker kindly sawed a loaf in half for him, saying a single person would let the bread go stale. Marshall had not always paid such attention to the small tasks of daily life, but it pleased him to economize. He remembered
the Depression. He didn’t like extravagance. He was making nearly a hundred thousand dollars a year before he retired, and now with his pension and without Loretta, he had more than he needed.

  But what did he think he was doing? He walked and walked. If he was really serious about finding Robert and the Vallons, he should be out doing research, he told himself. Instead, he was depending on Nicolas. He didn’t know what to do. Gordon Webb was flitting back and forth across the Pond and acting like it was a dipshit job. Marshall would have been happy to be in that seat, even as a co-pilot.

  On the boulevard Montparnasse he saw an aged woman with pinched eyes and a doughy face holding out a bowl for coins. She was swathed in black, stooped, breathing with difficulty, agony on her face. She could be a war widow from World War I, he thought. And she would have lived through the Occupation. He recalled the women in black who had taken care of him. What this woman could tell him! He found change in his pocket and dropped it into her bowl.

  Don’t put your hands in your pockets! Don’t jingle your change! That is what Americans do. Did his guide on the train warn him about that? Lebeau?

  He didn’t speak to the old woman, but walked on, troubled. He saw so few beggars, just the cluster of clochards by the Seine.

  NICOLAS TELEPHONED TO REPORT abysmal luck with the National Archives and the library.

  “All day I searched. The Résistance. The Bourgogne. The RAF, the Free French, the U.S. Army Air Force. It is just as I feared—everything I wanted is classified! Even now, after so long a time.” Marshall could visualize Nicolas’s boyish gestures, his hand tapping his head, flailing the air, forming a fist toward the ceiling. “They have buried our history, Marshall. We are adrift.”

  Marshall was apologetic. “I don’t mean to waste your time.”

  “No matter. It should not be so hard to find a résistant,” Nicolas said. “They’re so proud of what they did. But the collaborateurs—pfft—no!”

  Nicolas had learned nothing more about Lebeau or the Bourgogne line, so he urged Marshall to try the épicerie in Saint-Mandé again. “I have a strong suspicion he is the person you remember at the Vallons. Good luck with talking to the daughter.”

  “I’ll try to be more courteous this time,” Marshall said. He wasn’t sure he was ready to face that spitfire again.

  The picture in his mind was growing clearer. A young guy riding a bicycle into Paris from the country, a goose hiding in the basket. The breeze ruffled his hair as he pedaled past a German convoy. He was singing.

  “Whenever you find your résistant, I am certain he will welcome you,” Nicolas said. “Meanwhile, Marshall, I will search more around Chauny for people who might recall something about those who helped you before you came to us.”

  “The women in black.”

  “Oui.”

  27.

  MISSION TO SAINT-MANDÉ. DEPART AT 1400 HOURS. ALL systems ready. Marshall was on the case now. No more dillydallying. He had slept well the night before. And he had downed two expressos.

  He could have walked, but the Métro was convenient—Alésia to Châtelet, changing to the #1 train for Château de Vincennes, exit at Saint-Mandé. The épicerie was in a middle-class neighborhood, on a side street of old apartment buildings and a few small shops.

  The woman he had tangled with previously was not in sight. Marshall bought a banana from a kid in a long apron who was slapping a towel at flies. When Marshall asked for Robert Lebeau, the kid tossed a long, dark lock from his forehead and said he hadn’t seen him in a long time.

  “Could I reach him by telephone?”

  “Beaucaire is a long way, monsieur.”

  “I can afford a long-distance call.”

  “He has no telephone.”

  The kid pointed to a minuscule notepad next to a basket of apples.

  “Write a note to my cousin,” he said. “She runs things.”

  Marshall scribbled a message, with his telephone number. A small dog—an animated mop-head—appeared from a nest beneath the counter, yapped at Marshall sleepily, circled, and tumbled back into his basket.

  “Merci. Au revoir,” Marshall said to the kid.

  Marshall was unworldly, ignorant about the real preoccupations of the people around him. He had tried several times to strike up conversations with various people about the war but got nowhere, except with Guy at his shop. After seeing the old woman on the boulevard Montparnasse, he began to think he saw a sadness in the faces of older people on the street.

  He strolled on through Saint-Mandé, looking for anything that might prod his memory of 1944. He didn’t recognize the shops on the main avenue. Nicolas suspected the Vallons had lived here and that the Bourgogne network had been active in this area. That spring, the Bourgogne had become the main channel for transferring fallen aviators from Paris to the south. Marshall tried to imagine the clandestine activity that occurred here, when people lived out their secret, seething anger. This was an ordinary neighborhood—busy, but American flyers being shepherded down the street would have been as obvious as astronauts at a hoedown, he thought.

  The Vallons’ flat was expansive, with airy, bright rooms off a long parquet corridor. After six weeks of confinement in the small house in Chauny, sometimes sleeping behind the armoire, Marshall luxuriated in the spaciousness of the apartment in Paris. More and more American bombers were falling from the sky, and the airmen were streaming into the city. Some of them came to the Vallons for false IDs before going to ground in scattered safe houses. He heard murmurs about the snow melting in the mountains; waiting for the right connections; waiting for a particular message concealed within the French news from the BBC. Robert came every couple of days, often bringing a flyer in need of a new identity. Robert was an earnest youth in a heavy overcoat, with a rucksack, from which he drew money and news and papers. Marshall had envied Robert. Damn, he had those wheels. On his bicycle he could go anywhere. Marshall imagined him checking designated “letter boxes” for secret messages or biking to outlying towns to finagle with secret suppliers. Mme Vallon had said Robert’s ability to gather scarce foodstuffs was a miracle. He brought olives and almonds. Once he brought a chicken.

  Marshall walked from Saint-Mandé to the Bois de Vincennes, remembering that Annette had led him and three other aviators on a long walk through a park, for exercise. It was probably this park, he thought as he crossed the street. They were not to acknowledge her, or talk to one another. They had to remember what they had been taught about the French way of smoking. It was better not to smoke. They had no change to jingle in their pockets, and they would not have dared to buy something at a kiosk even if they had. They followed this sprightly, fearless girl, who walked along, carrying her book satchel through the park as if she was on her way home from school. She would pause sometimes to look at a plant, or pet a dog, or sit on a bench to consult a book or write on a scrap of paper, allowing the flyboys to saunter in different directions for a few moments, so that they weren’t a conspicuous troop moving together.

  Now, near the entrance to the park, Marshall knew with certainty that this was Annette’s neighborhood. He recognized the enormous boulder across the street. The zoo was there, right where he remembered. This was the zoo Annette had taken him to, not the one at the Jardin des Plantes. Just inside the entry was a rock mountain rising out of the earth, several stories high. It was for the mountain goats. He remembered seeing a pair of German soldiers who were looking up at the giraffe and did not realize there were American B-17 crewmen in their midst. Marshall held his breath. He was thrilled. Being up in the sky in a bomber was one sort of unreality—one form of surreal dislocation—but moving among the enemy as they strode around in their hostile regalia was even more improbable. His life had become a weird drama he could scarcely comprehend.

  Turning back, he crossed the busy street and tried to get his bearings—the space, the shape of the place. Annette had led the airmen to the Bois de Vincennes from her apartment. He thought he would recognize the buildi
ng. Saint-Mandé was a long main avenue with dozens of other streets running into it. He decided that the correct direction was to the left. He walked down a long road parallel to the avenue. He turned onto a street at random, saw an unfamiliar church. He tried the next street. The apartment had been on a corner. Maybe it was two blocks in. He walked past abundant trees, along small streets, toward the centre ville.

  For an hour or more he crisscrossed the streets. From time to time he thought he recognized an intersection, a set of windows, a small alley. But something would seem wrong and he would try another street. Memory was a bitch, he thought. The Vallons’ apartment was probably not here at all. But he was sure of the zoo.

  A group of children was entering a small park behind a blond woman carrying a green canvas satchel. He came to a corner, turned left. Another corner. Was it here? He studied a pale gray stone-block building with green frilly ironwork on the tiny pigeon-walk balconies. It was an attractive building, solid and clean. This could be it. He stepped back, considering, remembering how he had stood far away from the lace curtains but could see a triangular section of the street. His heart lifted. This could be it.

  Maybe they had an unlisted telephone number and were sitting at home right now.

  IN HIS MEMORY, perhaps exaggerated, the Vallons had treated Marshall as a privileged guest—their privilege as much as his. He had confidence in them. They could get him safely to his next hideout, farther south, farther on to Spain. Despite air raids and the possibility of the Gestapo dropping in unannounced, they seemed unafraid. Their company was so pleasant that he would not complain.

  He had wanted to do something to repay the Vallons, but he could only watch and wait. One day from the window he saw a couple hurrying along the street, heads down, talking worriedly. He could see some French police and two German officers down the block. He was alone in the apartment. He knew what to do if he heard jackboots stomping up the stairs. He was to retreat through the kitchen window onto the balcony and into the kitchen window of the next flat. M. Gilbert lived there, “a nice man who will take care of you.” But what if the jackboots were coming for M. Gilbert? No, they assured him. This could not be.