The Girl in the Blue Beret - Bobbie Ann Mason [120]
She smiled, and in the bright light he could see tiny scars on her chin, faint little zigzags. They did not interrupt her loveliness.
“I’m glad I bought those berets,” he said. “We’ll get cold at night.”
“Ah, bien, I did not doubt your spirit of adventure. This will be a test. And thereafter we can say with pride, ‘We did that!’ ”
“How long have you been thinking of this?”
“About five minutes. When you mentioned the Basques.” Her smile dissolved. “But really, those mountains have been on my mind for years. I do much hiking, but I always avoided the high mountains. All the boys we sent across …” She frowned, then touched his shoulder affectionately. “But with you, I thought suddenly—now is the time. I would like to cross the mountains with you.”
Marshall was pacing the length of the terrace now. The Pyrenees had troubled his sleep for years, dark images of rugged heights and rocky canyons, cold and unforgiving.
“I would worry about you,” he said. “The Pyrenees are dangerous. I don’t want anything to happen to you.”
“Pfft!” she said, flipping her fingers outward. “If I could build an airstrip with my bare hands, I could hike up a mountain!”
“That was long ago,” he said.
“And this is now,” she said.
“AT YOUR AGE? You’ve got to be kidding, Dad.”
“I’ve got new boots.”
“Still, if the airlines won’t let you fly, then what does that say? I never knew you to be an athlete.”
Albert had driven from Manhattan to the house in New Jersey and had arrived just as the telephone rang.
“I’ve done nothing but walk since I got to France,” Marshall said, almost defensively.
“What about altitude sickness?” Albert said. “Oh, sorry, I guess you’ve spent half your life at high altitudes.”
“This is not Mount Everest,” Marshall said. “There are official hiking trails and rest stations along the way. And I won’t take the most strenuous crossing—not like I did in ’44.”
Besides, he was going with a woman who was an experienced hiker, he told Albert.
“Aha!”
Genial banter moved along the edge of accusation. Marshall ignored it. Everything had to be reconsidered now, he thought. He remembered Albert and Mary in Halloween costumes. He was guiding them down the block, and the evening was growing dark. Mary cried because her witch hat kept falling off. Albert dropped his candy in the dirt and kicked it off the curb. Then, in no time at all, it seemed, they were in graduation gowns—Mary’s hat flying up like a Frisbee, Albert flapping bat wings—and then they were gone.
Albert relayed telephone messages from two of the crew: Chick Cochran and Bobby Redburn. Cochran had heard from someone in Hootie Williams’s hometown who would be writing to Marshall in Paris.
“That’s good,” Marshall said. All the crew was accounted for now.
Hootie. He had thought he was free from the memory of Hootie, but Hootie kept coming back, like the soldier in the old story of Martin Guerre, an impostor who returned to a family that wasn’t his.
IN THE WEEK of busy preparation for the hike, Annette told him nothing more about her deportation to the camps. The book seemed to be closed. “I’ve told you enough,” she said. “Now we can go forward.”
Her resilience, her insistent good nature reasserted themselves. She seemed unburdened now. But he knew that she was willing herself to be strong. He could not look at her now without seeing, behind her mature grace, the thin girl working on the airstrip—hungry, latched to her mother, fighting snow and wind. Death all around her, bodies in the snow.
Annette consulted guidebooks, located a hiking club, and reserved a hotel room at the edge of the mountain pass. By driving up to the pass, they could hike across the border in only a day. It would be simple, she said. He did not want to read the guidebooks. He did not want to go trekking across those mountains again, but he wanted to please her.
He fed the animals, gathered the eggs, cleaned out the horse shed. There was more flower deadheading. Lost in the immediacy of the chores, he relaxed and was content. She would not let him help her snip the