The Girl in the Blue Beret - By Bobbie Ann Mason Page 0,10

Sometimes I think about offering you a hammer.”

The twenty-three-year-old kid disguised in a Frenchman’s peasant outfit invaded his mind again now, like a pop-up cartoon character. It was the fatuous youth he had seen when catching his reflection in windows.

That night, he dreamed he saw the girl in the blue beret strolling up the Champs-Elysées with a book satchel slung over her shoulder. When he awoke, the dream puzzled him, but then he remembered eating ice cream with her—a small cardboard container of black-market ice cream, smuggled in newspapers and straw.

What had happened to her? Did he have any chance of finding her and her family again? And Robert, who had brought the ice cream on his bicycle. He remembered Robert speaking in hushed tones with Marshall’s host family in Paris. He teased some papers from his coat lining, and the husband and wife studied them for a long time, whispering exclamations. The woman crumpled the papers and tucked them in the stove. Marshall remembered Robert’s bright young face, the meaningful laughter that punctuated what seemed to be a serious discussion. Marshall longed to go out with him, to be of help. Anything. He envied Robert, who went off on hazardous missions, while Marshall was fastened up like a fattening calf.

6.

MARSHALL, WAITING FOR JUNE, LIVED ON TV DINNERS—A slab of meat loaf, mashed potatoes with a stagnant pool of dirt-brown gravy, peas, carrot cubelets, and a cubbyhole of apricot cobbler. Airline food, one of life’s staples. He recalled the scarcity of food in France during the war, the way a family shared its meager rations. He remembered a large carrot, baked in ashes and sliced into five pieces, each piece enlivened with several dusky flakes of an herb.

Sometimes in the evening when he watched an old forties movie, he drank a beer, but his pilot’s discipline still restrained him. Twelve hours from bottle to throttle. He didn’t like to cloud his mind. His brain bag was gathering dust, and his uniform was drooping in the closet. He imagined it hanging there a hundred years in the future. Numbly, he stared at the global map on his wall, Paris gleaming like the North Star.

He still wore his wrist chronometer, set to Greenwich mean time. He was reviewing his French books.

He slept on the studio bed in his den, where he had escaped so many hours over the years—reading books, writing on a portable typewriter, studying French. The kids’ bedrooms, down the corridor in line with the den, were like abandoned stores, still full of merchandise. Like someone studying for exams, Marshall spent his days and nights with the war—books, tapes, and the movies and documentaries on TV. One night he stayed up until two to watch Twelve O’Clock High again, and he couldn’t sleep after the movie ended. It was set at an air base in England like Marshall’s. When he closed his eyes, he was flying over the English countryside, low over the patchwork of fields and the white scar along the Channel. Winter-brown fields and hedgerows and clusters of trees enclosed the base, peacefully, as stoic as the English people. When the airmen traveled into Kettering, the quiet village seemed safe and snug until they saw the ration lines and the blank shelves of a grocery.

During a layover in London a few years before, Marshall had returned to the airfield at Molesworth. He took a train to Kettering, then a bus to Thrapston. The train was blue, more modern than the dusty green wartime coach that he recalled. He found the base deserted, with weeds growing through the tarmac, and he recognized the scene—Dean Jagger in Twelve O’Clock High returning to his old base and hearing the B-17s roar to life in his memory. So much in the world was predictable, a celluloid cliché, Marshall thought. Like Jagger, he could feel the throbbing of the B-17s, their bodies sexed up and loaded with their bombs. The crews had decorated the noses of their planes with alluring women, cartoon characters, snappy quips. Dirty Lily was scantily garbed in black, with raven hair and red puckered lips. She was their figurehead, their cheerleader, their whore and mama all in one. All the guys were ready to fly, bomb the Jerries, be heroes.

The old base was bare and neglected, surrounded by barbed wire, with warning signs. As he stood gazing through the fence, he could make out a distant cluster of trees next to several rows of Nissen huts that had formed