The Girl in the Blue Beret - By Bobbie Ann Mason Page 0,17

going to spend some of my spare time on, hoping, of course, that my linguistic accomplishments will be merely cultural and not of practical value.

*

Hello, honey,

I just got back from the show here on the base. It was “Palm Beach Story,” with C. Colbert and J. McCrea. I thought it was pretty good, although a bit risqué for these ingenuous blue eyes of mine! This makes two nights in a row that I’ve patronized the post flickers.

*

I took some swell pictures today, baby, and I hope to be able to send you some prints. Just got off work a little while ago and I am dog-tired, plum worn out and exhausted. I’m going to make a quick trip to the mess hall and come back and climb into bed, and I hope no one wakes me until noon tomorrow.

He took his old camera on one of the missions. He remembered patching a couple of pinholes in the bellows and polishing the lens. He wanted to get some action shots, but there wasn’t much action that day. He snapped Webb at the controls, then Webb snapped him, cigarette dangling from his lips, his helmet flaps loose. Out the window other planes in the formation were visible, like blackbirds. He didn’t know what happened to that picture.

Hootie got 137 shillings out of a slot machine in the Club tonight.

That’s about 29 bucks. Hootie has all the luck.

*

I made my debut as an extra in the motion picture business today. There’s a training film being shot here called “Target—Berlin,” and a bunch of us walked up and down (self-consciously) in front of the camera. Supposed to be crews going from briefing to the planes. I have to be up early tomorrow, so I may have a busy day.

Marshall pored through the letters, trying to adjust his memories to the evidence. What a sentimental stripling he had been! What a stone-face he became later on. It surprised him to encounter that younger guy, cooking up sweet talk. After he and Loretta were wed and settled, maybe he thought he didn’t have to compose endearments anymore. He wondered if it had seemed no longer necessary then to try to go deeper in his heart. At Molesworth and during flight training, he was sociable enough and loved high jinks, but after the war, he tended to stand apart. He always told himself that the sobering responsibility of flying for the airline and raising a family required a certain discipline.

He thought again of Neil Armstrong. From what Marshall had read, Armstrong seemed to be the ultimate pilot. When the lunar lander’s computers failed, and it was running low on fuel, and the landing zone was unexpectedly full of huge boulders, Armstrong calmly maneuvered over the rocks to a safe spot. Armstrong’s attitude was Give me the job and I’ll do it. O.K., I did it. I landed on the moon. Here’s your moon rocks. Now leave me alone. Marshall liked that.

HE THUMBED THROUGH the letters, recalling the pleasure of receiving word from Loretta, her chatter sustaining him from day to day. Her picture, propped on an upended fruit crate in his room, was like a poster of a movie star selling war bonds. Before each mission he tried to memorize one feature—her temples, a downy shadow on her cheek, her bangs, or her rolled-under hair, the top upswept and fastened with a barrette. Her upper lip had a slight kink on the left, like a deliberate sign of flirtation, but he knew it to be a scar, just a nick from flying glass, a broken glass on a kitchen floor when she was a girl. He had had to reassure her many times about the scar. It didn’t detract from her looks. It gave her character.

In that cold, shoddy room in England, it was hard to look at her photograph, to be reminded of the sweet softness waiting for him stateside. It distracted him from the urgency of his job, fighting the damned war.

His mind ricocheted between the movielike quality of the life he had reported in the letters and the life he remembered. Each time he read about an early rising the next day, he knew exactly which mission it was. An early rising meant staggering out in the predawn chill to the mess hall for the special mission-day breakfast with genuine eggs. Then came the briefings, followed by the jeep rides to the check stations. Memorizing maps. You never knew for sure that you were