The Girl in the Blue Beret - Bobbie Ann Mason [55]
The last letter was from Gordon Webb, Lawrence Webb’s son. Marshall had written to the pilot’s widow about his visit to the crash site, and she had passed the letter along to her son. Marshall had a fleeting memory of a rambunctious tyke with a grieving mother after the war when he and a couple of the crew went to Baltimore to pay a condolence visit. Now Gordon Webb wrote that he was flying for Pan Am, out of Kennedy, and that he often flew to Paris. He wanted to meet Marshall, to hear firsthand about the incident that took his father’s life. Marshall didn’t like the idea. He replaced the letter in its envelope and surveyed his mail.
It was too warm in the sun. He stood and made his way down the steps past a pair of picnickers and a woman with a baby stroller parked precariously on a step. The plum in his pocket had grown soft, and it was staining his jacket. He examined the plum, fingering the squishy, bruised spot. He crossed the street and dropped it into a waste bin.
Glancing up, he saw an L-1011 head into De Gaulle, its gear down. For the guys in the cockpit, the adrenaline was starting to pump. Get your heading right, sink rate right, speed right. Line her up, compensate for the wind, bring her in dead center, flare, kiss the tarmac, ease in the thrust reversers. God, he had loved it.
21.
IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT, WITH STREETLIGHTS AND NOISE streaming through the cracks of the shutters, Marshall tossed with his whirling thoughts. Words and images reverberated—Bourgogne, Lebeau, épicerie, rutabaga.
Bright lights spilled through the cracks of the dilapidated shutters. He needed curtains. He remembered putting up curtain rods for Loretta, screwing metal pieces to the window facings and hooking together the metal tabs of an infernal system of brackets and flat, corrugated rods. He didn’t want to do that again. He could call Mary for advice. But he didn’t want to think about curtains. Or Loretta.
Next morning, he decided to go to the Gare du Nord and try to visualize it in the gray tones of 1944. The station was newer, busier now—no German officers in their olive-drab greatcoats, ballooned trousers, and menacing jackboots. He did not know what track he had arrived on, but as he roamed across the wide expanse of the station, heading toward the trains, he remembered more clearly his first sight of Annette when he arrived from Chauny. She was studying a timetable. On the train he had seen a workman wearing a blue beret, and he was concerned that there might be more than one female in a blue beret and he would follow the wrong one. But she was clearly the girl in the blue beret. Her white socks were slouchy, her shoe soles worn thin, her hair tousled. She wore a wool coat, buttoned up tight, and carried a book satchel. She glanced in his direction but did not acknowledge him or the other airman—Delancey, the navigator from Nebraska. At the end of the platform, she turned and crossed the large atrium of the station, then skipped down some stairs. Marshall and Delancey followed as she led them up and down other stairways and out into the street, then finally down into the bowels of the Métro.
She had zigzagged like a rabbit, Marshall thought now as he tried to re-create that journey.
After stopping for a pack of mints at a kiosk on the main level, he made his way back into the Métro. At a main juncture for train #4, a jazz ensemble with horns, a saxophone, and drums was playing a song he thought he recognized. But there was no reason he should know a popular song, unless it was some unlistenable noise he had been forced to hear from his children. Thinking about his children’s alien, alienating music saddened him. He stood listening to the musicians, young people from a music