The Girl in the Blue Beret - Bobbie Ann Mason [93]
“Well, let’s do that,” Marshall said. “I’ll have the boots for it, anyway!”
MARSHALL, COMFORTABLE IN PARIS NOW, no longer carried his cash in a safety pouch on his leg. He gazed at the window display at the Everything Store: fishhooks, a cheese grater, a doll made of seashells, and a Hemingway novel with a faded cover.
“Bonjour, monsieur l’Américain! Ça va?”
“Je vais bien, merci. And you, Guy?”
“Comme-ci, comme-ça. How does your search go?”
“Ah, Guy, I’ve found her. I was looking in the wrong place. She was in the Charentes!” Briefly, he told of his visit with Annette and the hike they planned together.
“A rendez-vous for a randonnée,” Guy said, smiling.
“Exactly so!” Marshall fingered some leather bags hanging from the wall. “I’m looking for a backpack, a small one for hiking.”
Guy produced a leather rucksack that resembled something a mountain climber of the nineteenth century would carry. The French farmers in 1944 carried such rucksacks, slung over their shoulders. Robert Lebeau had one. Marshall had one himself, holding his meager supplies on the train out of Paris.
“I’d prefer something more modern, Guy.”
“More American, you want to say.”
Guy revealed a cheap blue zippered pack that seemed suitable. Marshall paid and made small talk about his trip to the Charentes. Then he remembered that he needed a curtain of some kind to keep out the streetlights. For some time he examined the crop of dusty bamboo blinds that Guy offered. They had been kept for perhaps decades behind a rolled-up Turkish carpet.
“They look ancient,” Marshall said.
“Mais oui.” Guy began rummaging excitedly through some cabinets in the back of the store. He went back and forth searching. Then he found what he was looking for, a roll of dark fabric.
“This was to line the curtains, to shut out the light. I am surprised myself to find this. Maybe it is left from the wartime, because people couldn’t afford to buy it.”
“Exactly what I want.”
“You will keep the light inside at night, Marshall. And in the day the sun will stay away.”
Marshall flicked dust from the black roll. “I hope you’re not charging antique prices.”
Guy shrugged. “For you, just what it’s worth.”
“I’ll try it,” Marshall said. He paid for his purchase, declining to have it wrapped. Laboriously, Guy wrote out a detailed receipt.
“See you next time, Guy. Where do you take your vacation?”
“I go to the Languedoc in August.” Guy shut his cash drawer and straightened some knickknacks on the counter. “My wife likes breathing in the country. That’s what she says—in the country she can breathe. My two sons and daughter and my parents and my wife’s mother and my grandmother come. My brother comes with his family. We’re all there. Bien sûr, there is nothing like having all the family together. We do the picnics, the games. It is bliss!”
Guy’s broad smile made Marshall wistful. He thought of the family picnics Mary had mentioned. The elaborate logistics of the outings had always annoyed him, smothering whatever “bliss” he might have felt.
Walking down the avenue du Général Leclerc, he thought how unlike a Frenchman he was, with his inadequate attention to things that mattered most here—food and wine and family. History, they didn’t dwell on. Sex—well, maybe he could see eye-to-eye with the French on that.
The blackout curtain material was brittle on the edges, but he trimmed it and taped it to the windows. He wasn’t sure it was authentic, but it would do. That night he slept peacefully, and the morning sun was high before he was fully awake.
39.
ANNETTE HAD GIVEN HIM EXPLICIT DIRECTIONS TO THE VARIOUS places where she had guided the aviators, and now in his new hiking boots, he set off to find them. First, he went to Saint-Mandé to see where the Vallons had lived. He had been entirely wrong about the location. The building, made of handsome pale stone blocks, seemed less