The Girl in the Blue Beret - By Bobbie Ann Mason Page 0,6

out of control, and Armstrong hit the eject button at the last possible millisecond. Matter-of-factly, he parachuted to the ground, shucked the chute, and was back at his desk in thirty minutes. He didn’t even mention the incident to his office mate. Just another day on the job.

ALTHOUGH BASED AT JFK, Marshall lived in New Jersey. From the air, the landscape made sense to him, but on the ground the suburbs were a meaningless hodgepodge of deadpan houses and noxious shopping centers. Loretta had flourished in the suburbs. She knew the neighborhood of the school and the streets where she took Albert and Mary to harp and flute lessons when they were growing up. Yet she remained devoted to Cincinnati, her hometown, and she had gone there often, with the children, even after her parents were dead. His own parents died long ago, and he had lost touch with all other kin in Cincinnati and down in the Kentucky mountains.

The Stones’ house was a two-story, green-clapboard colonial hedged with boxwood. The interior was feminine throughout, except for his wood-paneled study, with its somber barometer and photographs of DC-3s and the beloved old Connie—the Constellation, the most satisfying airplane he had ever flown. He had always been like a special guest in this house, someone who dropped in every week or so. Loretta played her part as hostess. Home life had an air of pretense, as if staged. When he was away, did she strike the set?

Whenever he thought about his role in the family when the kids were young, he teetered off balance. What a fraud he was! What did he know about parenting? He was the dad who took the children to get the Christmas tree, the dad who carved the turkey, the dad who drove the station wagon on summer vacations. On holidays when he had to be away, Loretta simply shifted the date. The turkey waited. Santa too.

Loretta greeted him sunnily each time he returned. The transition was disorienting. In an airplane, he was perpetually alert, energized, a cat watching a mouse hole. On the ground, his real self floated away. Home was a maze of costumes and allowances and bicycle tires. He stayed in his den for hours on end, absorbed in the ancient Mayans or Viking explorers or Georges Simenon mysteries—in French. He read anything he could get his hands on. He jogged around the high-school track.

Yet he had held fast to the contract. This home life in New Jersey was what all the sacrifices were for—the training, the war, the job. His nuclear unit ensconced in this fine colonial two-story was his raison d’être. He had no complaint. As a 747 captain, he was a success, and his family was proud of him.

Now Marshall entered the deserted house, carried his bags up to the den, hung his uniform jacket in the closet, and set his hat on its accustomed shelf. The scrambled-egg brim of the hat seemed to be saying something, but he shut the door on its grin. He opened his carry-on bag and pulled out the gift teddy bear by the paw. Its ridiculous little flight suit made a mockery of him. He threw it into the closet, where it landed among a jumble of shoes.

At his base in England, in his leather flying jacket, he had jokingly called himself the Scourge of the Sky. Then he met those deadly Focke-Wulfs. He had always felt anguish over the loss of the bomber. A B-17 cost a million dollars, big money back then. And it cost forty thousand dollars to train a pilot. That he didn’t get to fly more missions was like a cruel coitus interruptus. He had never gotten over that disappointment.

He sat in his den, the most comfortable place in the empty house. A tape ran backwards in his mind. His final airline flight, and before that, embarrassing himself in the field in Belgium, and long before that, crash-landing in that field. Once again, he peered through the B-17’s windscreen as he brought the bomber in. The Belgians seemed fixated on the memory of the plane coming down in their field, so close it could have plowed into their church.

Now something had shaken loose. The distant past was no longer behind him, something to be shoved behind while he forged ahead; now it was in front of him.

HE HAD TO FIGURE out what to do with the house. Sell it? Turn it over to his kids? He didn’t want to