The Girl in the Blue Beret - By Bobbie Ann Mason Page 0,13

the Albert family. He remembered now that the Alberts had sent these pictures. They had been placed in the wrong folder. Here they were: Pierre and Gisèle, a romantic portrait of them, posed lovingly. It wasn’t a wedding picture. They were older, but still in love.

The other photo was a snapshot of the young boy, Nicolas, in long stockings and short pants that ballooned at the knee. He and two other children posed with a goat tied to a cart. Marshall studied the shaggy yard—a tangle of vines, the outbuildings, the fence, long tufts of grass that hid the children’s shoes. He had spent hours in that yard, mostly after sunset. He would recognize the place instantly.

9.

THE NIGHT BEFORE HE LEFT FOR PARIS, MARSHALL DREAMED he couldn’t pass a check ride. He made goof after goof. He stupidly called out that the reciprocal for due east was 230 degrees. He woke up, kicking off the covers.

Dreams like this were common for many pilots. Marshall would dream he was being tested for his pilot’s license, or his captain’s certification, and everything would go wrong. Numbers etched on his brain did cartwheels. As he lay in bed, he thought about Neil Armstrong, who had commanded the first orbital docking mission. His Gemini capsule had spun out of control. He and his crewmate were spinning so fast they were about to black out, but Armstrong figured out that a thruster must have stuck and made an instant, intuitive move that stopped the spinning. He had to make an unscheduled splashdown in the Pacific, but he prevented a catastrophe and became a national hero.

Looking at himself in the bathroom mirror, Marshall wondered what his own first words on the moon might have been.

“Sorry, folks. I hate to say this but the moon is plug-ugly! We spent twenty billion dollars to come here?

“And where are the moon pies?”

He showered, shaved, ate a bowl of Total, and drank the last of the orange juice. He knocked off the Times crossword in fifteen minutes. Then he washed his bowl and tried to think of what he had forgotten. He had half a day to kill. He repacked his two large bags to make room for his portable typewriter, and he stuffed his brain bag with his French books and some of the letters and photos from the war. Reciprocals kept going through his mind.

MARSHALL, ALWAYS DIGNIFIED on an aircraft, wore dress pants, a blue blazer with brass buttons, and a dark tie. He was seated in row 21, next to two overweight tourists in blue-jeans. It annoyed him to see passengers in jeans. As a pilot, he might have deadheaded in the cockpit jump seat, but now, flying standby, he sat in coach—an aisle seat without even a view of the horizon. He told himself he didn’t need a window. He had crossed the Atlantic so many times, he knew all the coastlines intimately. He sometimes imagined he knew the shapes and textures of particular places in the ocean, the angles of sunlight and shadows on hidden deeps.

When he first joined the airline, the journey to Paris took twenty hours on a Connie, with stops in Newfoundland and Iceland. The pilots slept in shifts, in bunks behind the cockpit. On a 747, the flight was about seven hours. A 747 captain could fly high above the weather on elegant, precise great circle routes. But a Connie flew at fifteen or twenty thousand feet, right in the weather. Marshall would take a Connie between clouds, around them, or sometimes above. He felt that he could maneuver the sky itself to keep the flight smooth. In one of his recurrent flying dreams, he was sitting in an easy chair atop a gleaming metal wing, steering the wing through the sky by thought control. Bank right. The huge wing dipped right, just as he wanted. Straighten. Climb. Accelerate. The magic machine obeyed precisely. He was alone in the sky, master of flight.

The sun was low when the plane was pushed back from the gate and began its crawl to the taxi lane. He couldn’t see the wing flaps from his seat, but he heard them coming down. Whenever Marshall had deadheaded, he was an alert back-seat driver. He could hear each sound the plane made. He could always hear mistakes.

Captain Vogel’s takeoff today wasn’t bad. Marshall loved the speed, the rush, the power of a takeoff even when he wasn’t in charge. He loved racing down the runway. His mind