The Girl in the Blue Beret - Bobbie Ann Mason [8]
Now Marshall entered the deserted house, carried his bags up to the den, hung his uniform jacket in the closet, and set his hat on its accustomed shelf. The scrambled-egg brim of the hat seemed to be saying something, but he shut the door on its grin. He opened his carry-on bag and pulled out the gift teddy bear by the paw. Its ridiculous little flight suit made a mockery of him. He threw it into the closet, where it landed among a jumble of shoes.
At his base in England, in his leather flying jacket, he had jokingly called himself the Scourge of the Sky. Then he met those deadly Focke-Wulfs. He had always felt anguish over the loss of the bomber. A B-17 cost a million dollars, big money back then. And it cost forty thousand dollars to train a pilot. That he didn’t get to fly more missions was like a cruel coitus interruptus. He had never gotten over that disappointment.
He sat in his den, the most comfortable place in the empty house. A tape ran backwards in his mind. His final airline flight, and before that, embarrassing himself in the field in Belgium, and long before that, crash-landing in that field. Once again, he peered through the B-17’s windscreen as he brought the bomber in. The Belgians seemed fixated on the memory of the plane coming down in their field, so close it could have plowed into their church.
Now something had shaken loose. The distant past was no longer behind him, something to be shoved behind while he forged ahead; now it was in front of him.
HE HAD TO FIGURE out what to do with the house. Sell it? Turn it over to his kids? He didn’t want to rent it out. That could be a disaster. He wanted to ask Albert to live there, but he doubted Albert would take care of it. Albert’s idea of upkeep was giving himself a biannual hair trim. The house needed some repairs. Loretta had always cautioned against letting the house become an eyesore in the neighborhood. It was on the verge. Marshall sprang into action. The day after his final flight he hired some odd-job guys who promised to come at the end of the month to work on the gutters and windows.
For several days he reviewed the war. In the mornings, he dashed through the Times crossword and went for brisk walks in the neighborhood, or he jogged around the track. On his birthday he ordered a pizza, and when it was delivered he was surprised to see that the sun was setting. He hadn’t opened the drapes all day. He had been absorbed in a history of the Mighty Eighth Air Force and was especially engrossed in the section on the Hell’s Angels, his bomb group.
He ate the pizza while watching a TV special about Hollywood’s early days. Nothing else was on.
During the next few days he plunged into his aviation library—the flight magazines and books, the videotapes, the clippings. He would get lost in the forties. He found Loretta’s big-band albums and played several of them straight through. As he listened to Artie Shaw’s ecstatic “Frenesi,” he realized that he knew every note by heart. He recalled days when he was waiting to ship out, when he and Loretta were sharing Cokes on silly, frenetic dates, or jitterbugging to the music of Blue Barron and his orchestra at the Castle Farms ballroom in Cincinnati. The yearning notes of Doris Day singing “Sentimental Journey” brought to mind the end of the war, when he married Loretta.
He kept the music going while he pored over maps of Occupied Europe and books about the air campaign against Hitler. He traced the route of his B-17’s last mission. He traced his route from Belgium to Paris.
He remembered an afternoon in Paris in 1944 when bunches of daffodils arrived in a bicycle basket from the country. Coming out of his long hiding, he saw flowering bushes in the park, and even though he had rarely given thought to flowers except for knowing that women liked them, he knew at once that the dancing floral displays amidst the sickly swastikas and dull green uniforms were a defiant sign of hope. He remembered seeing the girl rest her nose in the trumpet of a daffodil.
HIS DAUGHTER,