The Girl in the Blue Beret - By Bobbie Ann Mason Page 0,7
rent it out. That could be a disaster. He wanted to ask Albert to live there, but he doubted Albert would take care of it. Albert’s idea of upkeep was giving himself a biannual hair trim. The house needed some repairs. Loretta had always cautioned against letting the house become an eyesore in the neighborhood. It was on the verge. Marshall sprang into action. The day after his final flight he hired some odd-job guys who promised to come at the end of the month to work on the gutters and windows.
For several days he reviewed the war. In the mornings, he dashed through the Times crossword and went for brisk walks in the neighborhood, or he jogged around the track. On his birthday he ordered a pizza, and when it was delivered he was surprised to see that the sun was setting. He hadn’t opened the drapes all day. He had been absorbed in a history of the Mighty Eighth Air Force and was especially engrossed in the section on the Hell’s Angels, his bomb group.
He ate the pizza while watching a TV special about Hollywood’s early days. Nothing else was on.
During the next few days he plunged into his aviation library—the flight magazines and books, the videotapes, the clippings. He would get lost in the forties. He found Loretta’s big-band albums and played several of them straight through. As he listened to Artie Shaw’s ecstatic “Frenesi,” he realized that he knew every note by heart. He recalled days when he was waiting to ship out, when he and Loretta were sharing Cokes on silly, frenetic dates, or jitterbugging to the music of Blue Barron and his orchestra at the Castle Farms ballroom in Cincinnati. The yearning notes of Doris Day singing “Sentimental Journey” brought to mind the end of the war, when he married Loretta.
He kept the music going while he pored over maps of Occupied Europe and books about the air campaign against Hitler. He traced the route of his B-17’s last mission. He traced his route from Belgium to Paris.
He remembered an afternoon in Paris in 1944 when bunches of daffodils arrived in a bicycle basket from the country. Coming out of his long hiding, he saw flowering bushes in the park, and even though he had rarely given thought to flowers except for knowing that women liked them, he knew at once that the dancing floral displays amidst the sickly swastikas and dull green uniforms were a defiant sign of hope. He remembered seeing the girl rest her nose in the trumpet of a daffodil.
HIS DAUGHTER, MARY, had called on his birthday, and now she was calling again, checking on how the retirement was going. He had not mentioned his plans.
“I’ve been thinking,” she said. “Is there anything I can do?”
“What?”
“Is there anything you need?”
“Don’t worry about me.”
“Well, Albert and I are both worried.”
“Why?”
“Well, if you don’t have flying—”
“Afraid I’ll go off the deep end?”
“Listen to me,” she said sternly. He could hear her talking to her dolls—a scene from twenty years ago. “If you don’t have flying, what will you do?”
“I’m brushing up on my French,” he said.
“Say something to me in French.”
“Tu es une bonne fille.”
“A good girl?” She sighed.
“A good daughter.”
He waited for her to say he was a good father. He told himself she was trying to think of the French word and had drawn a blank.
Marshall regarded his children with mingled awe, amusement, respect, and alarm. He knew young people were headstrong, and he had intentionally granted his children the freedom to go their own ways. He had been an arrogant youth himself—stubborn, always butting heads with authority. Mary worked on a newspaper in Boise, Idaho, and Albert was still unsettled, working part-time in Manhattan while studying for his second master’s degree—first math, now design. They never told him much.
He never told them much either, but now he told Mary about his visit to the crash site and his notion of going to live in Europe for a while.
“I’d like to retrace the trail I took through France in ’44,” he said.
“That’s neat, Dad. A little trip to the past. That could be fun.”
The conversation came to a standstill. Marshall realized he was kicking at the doorstop between the kitchen and the dining room—a weighted, fabric pioneer girl with a churn. He said to Mary, “Your mom would kick me across the room if she could see what sad shape her churn-girl is in.”