The Girl in the Blue Beret - Bobbie Ann Mason [29]
“MARSHALL, OUR CONDOLENCES on your wife,” Jim said.
“Désolée,” said Iphigénie.
“Your wife, a beautiful woman,” said Jim, hugging Marshall’s arm. “Much too young.”
“Merci,” Marshall said, staring at the parquet floor. “It was merciful,” he said. “The suddenness. She didn’t have to suffer.” He hated saying that. He had said it so much it had begun to seem like the truth.
Marshall was speaking French, in deference to Iphigénie, but she quickly switched to English. Jim, a couple of years older than Marshall, had a new paunch. Iphigénie, who worked in fashion design, was unsmiling, and she was dressed up in a chic outfit like someone about to go to a reception at the Hôtel Crillon.
“Retirement is a whole different ball game, Marshall,” Jim said.
“I can’t imagine it yet.” Marshall laughed. “I’m liable to hijack a jumbo—if I could find someplace to park it.”
“I’d go with you, but Iffy wouldn’t let me.”
Iphigénie caressed Jim’s cheek. “He calls me this questionable sobriquet—”
“Only because I love you, ma chérie,” Jim said.
Jim insisted on showing Marshall the view from the bathroom window—the head and shoulders of the Eiffel Tower.
“The view from the bidet,” Iphigénie said with a wry smile when they returned.
“I knew a bidet had to be good for something,” Marshall said.
Jim laughed. “Last year some Americans rented the apartment next door for a few weeks, and they used their bidet to wash potatoes!”
“That seems logical to me,” Marshall said.
A memory hit him. He had washed his feet in the Vallons’ bidet in 1944.
Later, as they were having coffee, Marshall told Jim and Iphigénie that he intended to follow the trail he took in 1944 and try to find some of the people who had helped him. He explained about the two families whose names he knew. “But the Vallons aren’t in the telephone book. I know where the Alberts lived, in Chauny, but of course they may be gone.”
Iphigénie shuddered. “I would not want to go back to that time.”
Jim said, “Iphigénie’s family had it rough during the war.”
“It was nothing but pain, Marshall,” she said.
Marshall thought he might soon regret this visit.
Iphigénie said, “You won’t find anyone who will talk about the war.”
“Wouldn’t people in the Resistance talk?”
“They are not in the telephone book under ‘Résistance’!” she said dismissively.
“But there were Resistance newspapers. Maybe the libraries—”
“The true names wouldn’t be known,” she said. She pooched her lips out disdainfully. “They had code names.”
She began removing the coffee cups. “People don’t talk about the war,” she repeated.
JIM WALKED WITH Marshall toward the Métro. Marshall was getting tired. He apologized for having upset Iphigénie.
Jim said, “She was a little girl during the Occupation. She was sent away to her grandparents’ house in the country, so she was separated from her parents.”
They walked down the block, then paused by a news kiosk. Marshall said, “I always regretted that I didn’t get to fly on D-Day.”
“The point is, Marshall, you were part of the whole thing. The big picture.”
“And you?”
“Well, that morning flying across the Channel never leaves me. And as we got near the beaches—it was wall-to-wall ships down there.”
They walked on. At a street corner they waited for the light. Jim said, “I wouldn’t have missed it for anything. You know, I don’t think I could have done what those guys did, the ones who waded to the beach. Imagine. There’s a thousand Jerries with machine guns in bunkers, and the Army hands you a rifle and tells you to go on up that beach. I mean, God almighty.” He paused. “All I had to do was bomb a bridge. I could turn around and go home.”
“I know what you mean.”
Marshall and Jim crossed the street with the light and stopped on the corner.
“What do you miss most about flying, Jim?”
“God, everything.” Jim scratched his head and looked straight ahead.
Marshall didn’t say anything.
Instead of taking the Métro, he decided to walk. By the time he reached his room, he couldn’t resist a nap.
JET LAG HIT HIM by surprise. With no airline schedule, he gave in to insomnia and