The Girl in the Blue Beret - Bobbie Ann Mason [11]
“The neighbor says she saw you peek out beside the curtain this afternoon. That neighbor is good, but I don’t know if all the neighbors are good. You can’t trust. Stay away from the windows.” Pierre’s voice had been severe, Marshall remembered.
Le petit Albert. It dawned on him that news of Marshall’s son signaled a great achievement for the Frenchman. Pierre had risked his life to help Marshall survive the war and start a family. Marshall’s own son knew nothing about the source of his name—the Albert family, Pierre and Gisèle and Nicolas, who had been so important to Marshall for a few weeks long ago. He had given them his aunt’s Cincinnati address, and they had written it in a ledger. He remembered that little book now. Pierre had squirreled it away behind a small cupboard that had loose slats.
Marshall lectured himself, You weren’t that ignorant and unfeeling. You knew enough to name your son Albert, and evidently to write at least one letter to a family who took care of you.
He remembered Loretta saying, You can name the boy, and I’ll name the girl. Marshall wondered now if he had chosen the girl’s name, what would he have chosen? Gisèle?
If he went to Chauny again, he might find the house where he had hidden. Maybe it would be immediately familiar, like the field where the Dirty Lily had crashed. He could imagine Pierre and Gisèle still in their same house, their son living down the block.
Le petit Albert: the words shimmered.
Restless, he found some ice cream in the freezer and scraped the ice crystals off. It tasted old. In wartime France, ice cream was scarce, he remembered. No one had ice. The same word worked for both. La glace.
“In the war he couldn’t get ice cream,” he had heard Loretta explain to someone about his love for ice cream.
They used to have a hand-crank freezer, and when he first tried it, in his attempt to be efficient, he turned the crank as fast as he could and then let it rest a moment, then cranked it again at full gallop.
“That’s not the way you’re supposed to do it,” Loretta said several times. He paid no attention. When the cream began leaking out, he learned that he had made whipped cream, which had swelled quickly.
“I tried to tell you,” Loretta said, laughing. “But you always have to haul off and get the job done. Sometimes I think about offering you a hammer.”
The twenty-three-year-old kid disguised in a Frenchman’s peasant outfit invaded his mind again now, like a pop-up cartoon character. It was the fatuous youth he had seen when catching his reflection in windows.
That night, he dreamed he saw the girl in the blue beret strolling up the Champs-Elysées with a book satchel slung over her shoulder. When he awoke, the dream puzzled him, but then he remembered eating ice cream with her—a small cardboard container of black-market ice cream, smuggled in newspapers and straw.
What had happened to her? Did he have any chance of finding her and her family again? And Robert, who had brought the ice cream on his bicycle. He remembered Robert speaking in hushed tones with Marshall’s host family in Paris. He teased some papers from his coat lining, and the husband and wife studied them for a long time, whispering exclamations. The woman crumpled the papers and tucked them in the stove. Marshall remembered Robert’s bright young face, the meaningful laughter that punctuated what seemed to be a serious discussion. Marshall longed to go out with him, to be of help. Anything. He envied Robert, who went off on hazardous missions, while Marshall was fastened up like a fattening calf.
6.
MARSHALL, WAITING FOR JUNE, LIVED ON TV DINNERS—A slab of meat loaf, mashed potatoes with a stagnant pool of dirt-brown gravy, peas, carrot cubelets, and a cubbyhole of apricot cobbler. Airline food, one of life’s staples. He recalled the scarcity of food in France during the war, the way a family shared its meager rations. He remembered a large carrot, baked in ashes and sliced into five pieces, each piece enlivened with several dusky flakes