The Girl in the Blue Beret - Bobbie Ann Mason [78]
A year later, Caroline was in the apartment one evening with her two little brothers when her father appeared, drunk. He was haggard, mumbling, apologizing for coming without a surprise basket.
“Where is your mother?”
“She’s at the shop.”
“She was expecting me.”
His hands were trembling. He was agitated. He found some wine and poured himself a glass.
“Let me teach you a song I learned.”
Caroline didn’t understand all the words, but in the school yard she had heard something naughty about a woman’s belle chose, and he was singing this to her. She remembered him grinning as he sang, enjoying the trick he was playing on her innocence. She refused to learn the song.
“The cuckoo clock—did it ever talk again?” he asked.
She shook her head. “It needed to speak only once. To warn us, to inform us what was going on.”
“What was going on, my petite?”
She prayed for her mother to arrive. Her father, once handsome but now overweight and worn, stood before her with something glinting in his eye that made her afraid. She resolved to shield the two younger ones from this man.
Marshall reached to touch Caroline’s arm, but she didn’t respond to his gesture. She kept talking, as if she had to empty a vessel.
“I don’t know where he is. He went away after my mother died, a few years ago. I felt she died from the strain—not a legitimate wife, all those children, his drunkenness. I think she loved him, but he wouldn’t marry her and she always felt cast aside. So after my mother died, there was no connection, and I did not need to see him again.”
She no longer acknowledged her father, she said, and she had not wanted to answer Marshall’s questions about him.
“How did you and your brothers and sisters support yourselves?” Marshall asked. He rubbed his eyes, as if that would help.
“We had the shop, and my brothers had work. But we did not exist for his family. We do not have his name.”
“How do you have the grocery?”
“He gave the épicerie to my mother long before. She made it a beautiful place.”
“Your father wasn’t all bad, if he gave her the store.”
“I recall the terrible times.”
Caroline turned her head aside, then bent over the dog and stroked him.
“I’m sorry,” Marshall said.
Then, for a while they sat together silently. Marshall tried to sort out what he had heard. Robert had spiraled downward—but why? In 1944 he had seemed so capable. What had he seen and done after Marshall knew him?
“The war …,” he said. But then he could find no more words. He wasn’t sure what he wanted to say.
ON THE WALK to the Métro, he felt empty and hard-hearted. Caroline hadn’t insisted that he stay, but she seemed disappointed. She had grown up in a divided home, not an easy thing. When they had said goodbye, with a quick double peck, he wasn’t sure he would see her again. She gave him a small, wan wave as he left her door and turned toward the stairs.
He waited at a crosswalk for the light to change. Ahead, the neon green cross of the pharmacy was blinking, as if wounded.
The train was due in two minutes, and riders were gathering on the platform, many dressed for late-night shifts. Marshall sat on a bench, his mind dulled. The train arrived, disgorging a motley batch of people. Marshall slipped wearily into a vacant window seat, and as the train twisted through the deep tunnel he gazed through the glass at dark, grimy tiles and thick, snaky wires.
34.
“I HAVE FOUND ANNETTE VALLON,” NICOLAS SAID ON THE TELEPHONE.
Marshall, jangled awake by the ringing, became entangled in the cord and dropped the receiver. He fumbled to restore the connection but