The Girl in the Blue Beret - Bobbie Ann Mason [13]
He found some addresses in Loretta’s address book, and he began to write letters to the surviving crew about his trip to the crash site and about the boy’s father who died helping one of their gunners. He asked about their own escapes after the crash. Don Stewart, the tail gunner, had died in a Cessna in 1959. Marshall didn’t know how to reach Campanello, so he asked Grainger. “Since you bunked together in that German resort hotel, I figure you might still be in touch with each other,” he wrote, then wondered if he was too flippant. Marshall looked again at the kriegie card from Campanello. He didn’t get stateside till June 1945, and he remained in a hospital for many weeks. As far as Marshall could recall, none of the three POWs had ever talked much about life in the stalag.
7.
MARSHALL THOUGHT THE FAMILY WHO HID HIM IN PARIS WAS named Vallon, but in the Resistance, people often took false names. Robert was often there, bringing news and supplies. He bicycled out to Versailles one weekend and brought back a freshly killed goose hidden in a carpetbag. The farmer who sold him the fowl had declared it would be safer for him to carry a slaughtered bird, its honker silenced.
The apartment was alive with feathers, which Mme Vallon carefully saved for pillows. Marshall helped with the plucking. Since the rich smell of roasted goose would attract neighbors, maybe even suspicious German soldiers, Marshall had to be prepared to jump out the back window and to enter the neighboring apartment in case of a heavy knock on the door. The Vallons and their guests enjoyed their goose and their conversation, with a gaiety both genuine and frantic. Amidst the laughter and good will, they insisted that Marshall eat extra, heaping his plate. What was that guy’s last name? Marshall remembered him so well. Robert was good at cards, had a high-pitched laugh but little English. Marshall remembered hearing his bicycle in the vestibule, the two-toot signal of his arrival.
The girl was called Annette. He remembered her laughing. She was standing by the window, half hidden by the lace curtain, with springy spools of brown hair dangling beside her cheeks. She said, “Don’t look, but there are two German officers down there. Their uniforms are so silly! They look like ballerinas in those big pleated coats. Oh, I can’t say this, it’s too embarrassing, but they were walking where the neighbor’s dog was walking and one of them—oh, his boots!” She laughed. “They deserve that!”
At the time he had felt faintly humiliated to be guided through Paris by a girl. Marshall, an American bomber pilot, Scourge of the Sky. But now what she had done for him struck him differently. She was only a young girl, but she had bravely battled the Nazis, to aid high-and-mighty, grounded, hapless Americans like him.
He didn’t know if she was still alive.
8.
THE FAMILY PICTURES ON THE WALLS DISTURBED HIM. HE WAS startled to see Loretta staring at him, or to see the young children smiling, frozen in time. On impulse, he began taking down the pictures.
At a loss for storage space, he decided to stack them in the master bedroom. He had avoided that room for months, but now he forced himself to peek in. The bed was made, and nothing was loose—books, shoes. He had forgotten that on the bedstand on her side of the bed, Loretta had kept a framed photo of him in uniform, taken the year he was promoted to captain. He turned the picture facedown, then noticed the photograph on the wall near the dresser, a publicity shot taken for the airline during the heyday of the Connie. There he was, the co-pilot, with the pilot and the flight engineer, followed by three stews in gray suits and pert little caps. They were crossing the tarmac, and the magnificent Lockheed Constellation was shining in the background. They were a team, the essence of aviation’s glamour. That was what they were selling, and he had been proud to