The Girl in the Blue Beret - By Bobbie Ann Mason Page 0,3
was in approximately the same place.
But no, he was wrong. When he saw her on the bench, Delancey hadn’t been with him. He and Delancey had first seen her at the train station. Why did he meet her in the Tuileries? Then he remembered.
As he neared the place de la Concorde, he thought of the Concorde—the SST. He wished it would fly over, a happy coincidence, tying history in a knot. Moments of history entwined here—Marie-Antoinette lost her head; the Egyptian obelisk replaced the guillotine; Napoléon dreamed the triumphant arch. Marshall felt his own history emanate from him, as if he been holding it condensed in a small spot inside himself. Reviewing his past was new for Marshall, something that had started as he approached his sixtieth birthday—and retirement. Tomorrow was his final flight.
FOR YEARS, MARSHALL had dreaded retirement. Mandatory premature retreat, he called it, infuriated at the federal law. He hated being forced out. He was perfectly healthy, and he had stopped smoking ten years ago. Asking a pilot to stop flying was like asking a librarian to burn books. Or a pianist to close the lid forever. Or a farmer to buy a condo in the city. His mind entertained new metaphors every day.
Retirement would be like the enforced passivity he had endured during the war, after the crash landing. Then, he was a caged bird.
The airline didn’t want rickety, half-blind ancients at the controls. Screw the airline, he thought now. Roaming Paris, he composed the thousandth rebuttal he would never send in: Since being let go on account of advanced age and feebleness, I’ve been forced to adopt a new career. Henceforth, I shall guide hikers up Mont Blanc, and on my days off I’ll be going skydiving.
The pilots Marshall hobnobbed with might talk about investments, or summer homes, or time-share condos, but none of them really cared about anything except flying. One former B-24 pilot golfed, and an ex-fighter jock intended to sail his deep-draft sloop around the world someday, but Marshall thought their pastimes were half-hearted substitutes. He was interested in everything to do with aviation, and he was always reading, but he thought hobbies were silly. Collecting swizzle sticks or crafting model airplanes—he couldn’t imagine. Whenever he thought of what to do with his retirement, he drew a blank. Pushing the throttles forward, racing down the runway, feeling the wings gain lift, pulling the yoke back and aiming high into the sky—that’s what his pilot friends really wanted. That’s what he wanted.
Marshall wandered down a street of five-story apartment buildings. This was the lovely, proportionate architecture he remembered.
The people who had helped him in Paris during the war would be retired now, he thought. The French retired young. Robert? Rohbehr. Marshall didn’t recall the young man’s last name, but he would never forget him. Robert and his clandestine missions. He remembered Robert appearing in the small hours of the morning with an urgent message. He remembered Robert letting his rucksack fall to the floor, then reaching in like a magician to produce cigarettes or a few priceless eggs. Once, he pulled out an actual rabbit, skinned and purple. From inside the lining of his coat came thin papers with secret messages. Whatever happened to him after the war?
3.
MARSHALL ALWAYS ARRIVED EARLY FOR HIS FLIGHTS. HE TRIED to nap in the pilots’ ready-room at Charles de Gaulle Airport. He hadn’t slept well, his final B-17 mission blending in his dreams with the 747 he would be flying across the ocean for the last time. He read the newspapers and stoked up on coffee and peanuts. In his experience, peanuts balanced the caffeine turbulence without cutting the uplift of the caffeine itself. He wanted that uplift today. The night before, several of the crew had taken him out for a retirement wingding, complete with a late-night frolic at the Folies de Pigalle. He could hardly pay attention to the titillation, for thinking of his visit in Belgium.
Today his first officer, Erik Knopfler, who was twenty years Marshall’s junior, caught him trying to nap. “Hey, old man, getting your beauty sleep? That’s what you get for staying out late partying.”
“Yeah, they’re telling me I’m old. ‘Happy birthday, here’s your burial plot.’ ”
Carl Reasoner, the flight engineer, joined them. He said, “I know we’re always razzing you senior guys, but Marshall, I’d rather fly with you than most of these guys today coming out of Vietnam.”