The Girl in the Blue Beret - Bobbie Ann Mason [127]
“I could hardly believe this to be true. I thought about Philippe’s words for a long while.”
“You thought perhaps Philippe had the wrong guy?” Marshall asked.
“I wondered. But then I thought perhaps it was as if Robert had become the priest he hadn’t believed he could be. This is how I interpreted Philippe’s words. This was how Robert survived, I decided. He sacrificed, and the act of sacrifice filled him with strength.”
“And then when he came back, he collapsed?”
She nodded. “He may have believed that my father and the abbé had sacrificed themselves for him at the camp. That would have given him guilt. But it was normal for Father Jean to offer spiritual comfort, and he would have given Robert his food. Many of the older ones gave their food to the young ones. I know this was so. Father Jean would have done this. My father would have also. In fact, my father’s heart was not strong, and he would have not lived anyway under those circumstances. It was normal for the old to help the young.”
“Did you see Robert again?” Marshall asked.
“I kept in touch with him a little over the years. Eventually, he was able to tell me about my father.”
She bent her head for a moment. “I can’t.… There’s nothing to say.”
“It’s all right.”
“From time to time I went to the épicerie. Sometimes Robert’s wife was there, and she always seemed tired. She wore an apron—and no hat! She certainly didn’t impress one as the chic and privileged daughter of Monsieur the Hat King.”
“Do you know where Robert is now?” Marshall asked. “Caroline seemed to think he was in a mental hospital.”
“He spent some time in an institution, it is true. But it was a sanatorium, not a psychiatric hospital. About ten years ago he disappeared for a year, and his family was ready to consider him dead. But then he returned. And since then he has had the tendency to disappear for long periods. It is a good thing he provided that épicerie in Saint-Mandé to this Caroline. I do not know why he gave it to her and not to one of the sons, a legitimate one. But Robert always had some kind of obscure reasoning in the back of his mind.” She sighed. “Or do I know him at all?”
The waiter brought their food then. Annette straightened her back, looked directly at Marshall, and smiled. “I’ve talked too much!” she said. “Let us enjoy our dinner.”
55.
UPSTAIRS IN THEIR ROOM, THEY STOOD BY THE WINDOW LOOKING at the moonlit street. Marshall was not sleepy, and he anticipated that the moonlight, if not thoughts of Robert Lebeau, would keep him awake. Annette seemed wide awake too.
“Robert always worked hard,” she said. “He worked intently on anything he did. His gentillesse, his sensitive character—his sensibility was perhaps his weakness. He couldn’t achieve a balance with the torment. Maybe he couldn’t refuse it as I did.”
Annette rubbed the fabric of the curtain between her fingers, as if to feel the essence of the material. She said, “No one ever knew how I loved him, except Maman. She knew everything. I loved his hair, and the quiver in his upper lip when he smiled.”
She turned away from the window. The light in the room was dim, and her small frame seemed to fade into the shadows.
“I believe his disappearances are his way of regathering his strength,” she said. “I remember that when I used to go out with him to meet a group of aviateurs at the train, or to escort some of them to a safe house somewhere, if we passed a church and we had time, Robert would always go inside. It was a way of focusing his will, reconstituting himself. It was humble; he was a servant. Maybe his disappearances are periods of retreat, another way of being like the priest he couldn’t be.
“I believed in the church too, before the war, but it left me. Perhaps it left Robert also. I often wonder where he is. Sometimes I can imagine him in one of the spots that we went, our own little bowers, or escape places when we went out on our missions.”
“Are you still in love with him?” Marshall asked.
“That is not a practical question,” she said sharply.
She switched