The Girl in the Blue Beret

by Bobbie Ann Mason

  He watched the uniforms advance down the street. He was sure he could not be seen from below, but he was careful not to touch the curtains. The man and woman walking ahead of the police paused, the woman clasping the man’s arm. The Germans marched past, but the French police stopped the couple, and Marshall could see the pair rummaging for their papers.

  A black Citroën pulled up beside them. The police directed them into the backseat, as if offering them a lift. The car drove off.

  THE CONCIERGE ANSWERED when he rang the doorbell. She was a sweet-faced woman, maybe in her forties.

  “Excusez-moi, madame, je cherche les Vallon.” He explained more than he needed to, his words tumbling out.

  There were no Vallons. She shook her head. She had never heard of Vallons here. She had lived here fifteen years. If there had ever been Vallons, they had moved away before she arrived. He thanked her, and she wished him bonne journée.

  He went on his way. When he passed the mairie, the city-government building, he thought he could inquire about death certificates. But he hadn’t the heart.

  THE YOUNG WOMAN had returned to the épicerie. She was alone, and for a moment Marshall observed her standing dreamily behind the counter. She was nice-looking. Her little dog jumped out and barked ferociously as Marshall entered.

  “Bobby, arrête-toi,” she said.

  He stooped to greet the dog, turning his palm out for the dog to read his benign intentions.

  “Bobby, bon chien. Good dog.” He tried to pronounce “Bobby” the way she did—BOE-bee.

  “Bonjour, monsieur. You are here again.”

  “Naturellement. I’m a steady customer.” He chuckled, in what he hoped was a pleasant manner.

  “I apologize for before,” she said, surprising him. “I had too many tasks that day, and I had lost my head.”

  “In English, we would say, ‘I would lose my head if it wasn’t screwed on.’ ”

  She laughed, and he said, “But I was the rude one. I came, in part, to apologize.”

  She smiled. She had on an embroidered blouse and long earrings like a hippie, but she wasn’t grungy. Her short skirt revealed shapely legs, smooth knees. When she raised her eyelids to acknowledge him, he caught a glimpse of color on her upper lid, just a tinge of lavender, the shade of her blouse. She was very pretty. He realized that she was regarding him with interest, which pleased him.

  “Do you like dogs, monsieur?” she said.

  “I haven’t been around them much.”

  “My petit chien is so bored. I must take him for a tiny walk.” She called through a door to the back, “Michel, vas-y.”

  The kid appeared with a broom. The woman bent down to lift the dog, her knees flashing.

  “Bobby, mon petit artichaut.”

  She held the tan fluffy dog in her arms, hugging him. Then she let him down. As she fastened his lead, the dog wagged his entire body. Marshall did not recognize the breed, but the pooch was about half the size of his brain bag.

  “Michel will take care of the store for a few minutes,” she said. “Bobby is so good. He works with me all day. But he needs some air. Come along, monsieur.”

  “My name is Marshall,” he said, following her from the shop.

  “And I am Caroline.”

  “Did I guess correctly that Robert Lebeau is your father?”

  Nodding slightly, she said, “Come, Bobby.”

  They walked on the side streets, the dog sniffing happily along the way while Marshall ambled beside Caroline. Her perfume was strong, and her brown hair was shiny in the sun.

  “Viens, Bobby, allons-y.”

  The dog picked up his pace, and Marshall found himself quickly explaining his search—the shot-down aviator seeking his past. As before, she told him she had never heard of a family named Vallon.

  “I think I may have known your father,” he said. “He may have been one of the Résistance agents who helped me get out of Paris and back home. I didn’t have names, and I have very little to go on.”

  “But surely you are not so old?” she asked.

  “I am sixty.”

  “I was born after the war,” she said. “I have heard that my father was résistant, but I have not much to tell you. He never talked to me about the war.”

  “Did you ever ask?”

  She stared ahead. “He was not the type to talk,” she said.

  “Weren’t you ever curious?”

  “No.”

  They were passing a small park, where children were cavorting on slides and teeter-totters. One section of the fence came close to the edge of the narrow sidewalk and made passage difficult. They had to walk single file—dog, Caroline, Marshall. When the sidewalk widened, she stopped, leaned against the fence, and gazed through the iron bars at the children.

  “I never really cared about the war,” she said. She turned to him. “It is the past. Let’s talk of something else. Tell me about the United States.”

  28.

  “MY FATHER HAD TEN CHILDREN,” CAROLINE TOLD HIM THE next evening. She had met him at a café-restaurant she had suggested, near the Sorbonne. “He had five with his wife and five with his mistress. I am one of those from the mistress.” She lowered her head for a moment. “I detest to think of my mother like that. It makes my father less to love. It has been a misery knowing this. I do not even know my brothers and sisters who are from his wife. They grew up in Montreuil and were respectable and went to the Catholic school.”

  The room was large and comfortable, with wicker furniture and plush cushions, pastel colors, soft lighting. A peek at the menu confirmed his guess—this was an expensive restaurant. They were sipping aperitifs, something amber in small glasses. She was wearing a low-cut embroidered blouse tight on her breasts. He tried not to stare.

  “Let’s order the langoustines!” she said, giving the menu only a glance. “A specialty.”

  “Sure,” he said, wondering—and not caring—if langoustines might be pig snouts, or some obscure organ meats. They were the most expensive item.

  The waiter came, and Marshall ordered the langoustines for both.

  “I like this place!” Caroline said with a smile that illuminated her features. “I come here with my friends whenever we have something to celebrate—not so often! But there are birthdays.”

  Her mouth turned up in a crooked half smile—a hint of flirtation. The waiter asked about wine.

  “It’s all the same to me,” Marshall said to Caroline. “I’m woefully uncultivated.”

  “I’ll choose it,” she said. “It is no bother.”

  She said something unintelligible to the waiter, who agreed vociferously.

  Marshall asked her, “So you grew up with your mother in Saint-Mandé? Your father did not live with you?”

  She nodded. “It is near my father’s other family. He must have wanted to keep his two women close so he wouldn’t have to travel far between them!” She laughed flippantly. Marshall was charmed.

  She said, “My mother accepted the arrangement, but when he was at our apartment, it was an obligatory appearance only. This we understood. He didn’t supervise us. He left that to my mother. Maybe he thought he didn’t have that authority. I do not know. My mother kept some distance from him, for she had dignity. She did the cooking for him when he came, and he took care of her, in his fashion. I think she was afraid of him. I was afraid of him.” She stopped, concentrating on tearing a piece of bread.

  “Afraid he would hurt you? Hit you?”

  “No. But he was a stranger. He was there but not there. I don’t know what played in his mind.” She shuddered.

  Marshall was uncomfortable, thinking of his own home life. Albert and Mary would chatter about school or friends or games, and he would gaze out the window.

  The wine arrived, and he sampled it carefully. It was dark and rich.

  Caroline sipped some wine, then continued, “His mother, my grand-mère, refused to listen to anything bad. I did not know her well. On the point you want
to know, about the war, my grand-mère would refuse to listen. ‘Don’t bring it up,’ I can hear her say. She’s dead now, but I can still hear her say so clearly, ‘Robert, your wife doesn’t want to hear that, that other woman doesn’t even have a right to hear it, and I don’t want to hear it; that time is past. It’s over, fini. You have to think about providing for all those little ones. That is the only thing that should concern you.’ ”

  Caroline leaned over the side of her chair as if to check on her dog, but she had not brought him. Marshall supposed it was some kind of reflex action, or perhaps she just wanted to expose her cleavage.

  She said, “His mother, my grandmother, called my mother ‘that other woman’ in front of me! They did not know each other. Maman didn’t want to hear about the war either. All she asked for was financial support. She dutifully made his dinner on Wednesdays, and he gave her a pile of franc notes, not always the same amount. She never knew if there would be enough.”

  “Did he have the épicerie then?”

  “He had a business at Montreuil that was in his family for many years, and then he bought the épicerie for my mother. He did have the decency to provide us with the shop.”

  “Do any of your brothers and sisters work there?”

  She shook her head. “My brother Jean, my brother Claude—they made apprenticeships in construction. My two sisters married. I was married too—for about five years. Not now.”

  “Children?”

  She shook her head. For a while she talked about her marriage to a lazy machinist obsessed with horse racing. Marshall did not mention Loretta, and she did not ask him personal questions. From time to time he spoke up, to slow down her French or to ask her to repeat something. He didn’t know most of her slang. He was not sure she understood what he wanted. The Robert she was describing did not seem familiar. He knew he was prying, but he liked her voice, the way her breasts moved with all her gestures.

  The langoustines appeared—a pile of what looked like overgrown crawfish, or baby lobsters.

  “They resemble homards, do they not?” she said with a little laugh.

  They hit a language barrier. He couldn’t give her a French word for crawfish, and he didn’t understand homards. The langoustines lay on a bed of rice, in their weird red shells, with long feelers and bug eyes. He had to follow her lead in breaking the shells and slipping out the slim slivers of pink-tinged flesh.

  “Take the time,” she said, as she delicately extracted a morsel from the tail and brought it to her lips.

  For a while they worked on the food, which seemed more like a surgical operation than a meal. Marshall was sitting with a view of some old black-and-white photographs, perhaps from wartime, on the wall behind her. He couldn’t keep from looking at them, as if he might recognize someone. Caroline obliviously tackled her pile of crusty sea creatures. Earlier, as she told about her mother, he was studying a photo of mothers leading children across a cobblestone street, mothers in head-scarves tied in a triangle. Loretta wore a scarf that way in the forties, he recalled. That photo was between a picture of a line of people outside a boulangerie and a picture of a crowd of young people dancing in the street.

  “He gave my mother the épicerie,” Caroline repeated. “And now it is mine—since she died.”

  “Does he ever come into the shop?”

  She wiped her lips with her napkin carefully, then said, “No. He is never there.”

  “Then how can I find him?” he asked impatiently.

  “I don’t know.”

  “The kid said he was in Beaucaire.”

  “My cousin—Michel.”

  “Is your father in Beaucaire?”

  She shrugged. “I haven’t spoken to him in five years.”

  There was a trace of sadness in her voice, but also bitterness.

  “I really would like to find the Robert I knew,” he said. “Maybe I’ve got the wrong one. Don’t you have a picture of him?”

  “He was no father to me,” she said.

  THEY FINISHED THE MEAL chatting about other subjects. She wanted to know about California and New York, and he told her about flying 707s cross-country. She ordered coffee and chocolate cake, but he declined.

  “Coffee is for mornings,” he said. “It’s the insomniac’s enemy.”

  “Nonsense. One cannot conclude a good meal without some coffee. And of course some cheese or a sweet.” Her mouth turned up in a crooked half smile.

  “I’ll pass,” he said. But he caught her smile and peered into her eyes.

  Walking from the Métro at Alésia, rounding the corner past the dark hulk of the church, he thought about how her skin had glowed, how she laughed as she broke the little tails of the shellfish. Before they said au revoir, she had invited him to dinner at her apartment, in a week, and he had said yes. She offered to look for some old photographs of her father. He would have said yes even if she had said photographs of her ex-husband.

  THE NEXT MORNING, a cloudy Saturday, Marshall telephoned Nicolas.

  “Can that be true?” Nicolas said. “He has disappeared? Something odd is going on. She told me he was in Provence.”

  “She said her father’s family had lived in Montreuil, so maybe that’s a clue. I’m looking at a map. Maybe I could find the other business he owns. Maybe he’s there.”

  “I checked on that and found nothing.”

  “I can’t connect the guy she described to the Robert I remember,” Marshall said. “And where is he?”

  Marshall had the map spread on the bed, tracing his finger from the Saint-Mandé Métro stop to the zoo. “There’s intrigue here, Nicolas! Maybe he’s one of those guys who thinks the war is still going on, and he’s gone underground. Pardon me, I’ve been reading too many French mystery novels.”

  Nicolas laughed. “Maybe you should get on the Métro, Marshall, to seek him underground. Or the sewers of Paris, perhaps.”

  “That reminds me—what was the station I left from to go south, toward Spain?”

  “The Gare d’Austerlitz. The trains go south.”

  “I don’t think I’ve been there since the war.”

  “That’s where you would have departed with your guide, who could have been Lebeau. And, Marshall, you must know—it is the station where they sent the Jews out.”

  “Isn’t Germany north?”

  “They were sent to internment camps in France first.”

  “I see.”

  “Maybe you don’t. The French interned them.”

  He paused. Marshall didn’t know what to say.

  Nicolas said, “Don’t worry, Marshall. I will make some more inquiries, hoping to hear things Bourgogne. I will busy myself.”

  “I appreciate your help, Nicolas. Here I am in Paris, an old guy on the loose. Sometimes I feel pretty mixed up.”

  “Don’t worry, Marshall. You have friends here. One day, perhaps, you will be content. Don’t forget my parents are expecting you here again in Chauny for a grand Sunday at their table. Maman will invite you.”

  “I haven’t forgotten. Merci, Nicolas. Au revoir!”

  29.

  A LETTER FROM AL GRAINGER WAS THE ONLY MAIL IN THE BOX. Marshall was relieved to hear from him finally. Grainger, always the straggler.

  Dear Marshall,

  I was on vacation in Branson when your letter came. I was bowled over. Long time no see! 1963, was it? I’m sorry to hear about Loretta. She was the life of the party, I remember! Always saying something cute. Well, that’s a heartbreaker, and now you’re retired. Two big things at once, I guess you’re thinking. But I know you, Marshall. You’ll grin and bear it, keep a stiff upper lip. God never gives us more than we can bear. We know that from experience, don’t we?

  Whew. The account of your trip back to the final resting place of our old machine filled me up. Not to mention the resting place of our pilot. And I keep thinking about Hootie. That Hootie was a stitch. That was about the worst thing I took with me into captivity—the sight of that funny, twisted kid laying
on the ground. He looked so peaceful! I was sure he was dead. And I tell you I was scared seeing him like that, with all those people rushing at us. They got me off to somebody’s house, and there was a doctor, but my shoulder was so bad they had to take me to the hospital, and that’s when the Germans started to watch over me till I got better, and then they hauled me off to their fine country where the scenery—thanks to our guys!—was a lot of wreckage, things blown up, piles of stones and rubble. I kept giving thanks to the Lord that I was alive and that our bombers were just tearing them up. I knew the Jerries couldn’t last, so that gave me hope.

  While I was in Stalag Luft I, I found my strength in the Lord, and He helped me through the worst days. I’d say prayers every time we had a pinch of something to eat in that hellhole, or whenever we got mail and Red Cross packages. I think the others I bunked with—I was in with Campanello, you know—got tired of me making a fuss over Jesus. I’d say we had to share our rations with Jesus, and all sorts of stuff that must have sounded like claptrap, but I swear it got us through. Oh, we didn’t dig any escape tunnels, but we figured how to defeat our enemies by giving all the credit to Jesus. Man, that was a time.

  After we got out, I was sent back to Missouri, and my shoulder had healed a little funny, so I had several operations at St. Louis. I think it turned out OK, just aches a little when it’s real wet. Life has been pretty good since. I got established with my business out in California, but I get back to Missouri, even though my parents died long ago. I’ve got so many relatives. My two sons live there, and my daughter’s in California. They’re all busy producing babies and they’re all doing well. This was the American dream, huh, Marshall? I can’t complain. We did good.

  It’s sad to learn about the man who lost his life helping our crew, but it pleases me to hear how fondly the Belgian people remember us. I hadn’t given a whole lot of thought to them over the years, but now I see that they have been thinking of us ever since. It would be good to see you again, Marshall, and see the old crew, what’s left of it. Remember, the eyes of the Lord run to and fro.