The Girl in the Blue Beret Page 5

  Hootie is standing in the door, letting all our nice cold air out, and letting that nasty old warm air in from outside. I’m thinking of spreading a little water on our floor and using it for a skating rink in the morning.

  Marshall recalled with some fondness those dark, breakneck, nighttime forays and the foolhardy bike races to the mess hall in the early-morning blackness. After a while he had developed a sixth sense about walking in the dark. He tried to act like a keen animal. He learned to relax his pupils to take in more light. He grew sensitive to the nuances of darkness, how the eye could be trained to interpret shapes in the dark. In deep darkness, he learned to move with his arms out ahead. In good moonlight, the landscape was enchanted. And if there were drifts of mist about, sometimes passing across the moon like advertisements trailing behind a small plane, he might feel he had entered another world. The flimsy, scattered mists were pleasant, but the thick fogs smothered and enclosed the base with tooth-chilling cold. The fogs glowed with light borrowed from the moon, a light so dim the eyes could not penetrate it.

  Darling, I’ve said it before, honey, but—once more—please don’t worry a lot about my work here. I was optimistic enough, I think, about this business before I came in closer contact with it, but the outlook at closer quarters is even more reassuring. Plain statistics are very comforting, and when you add to them my undeniably outstanding ability as a Hot Pilot (?!) the future looks absolutely rosy! The only thing I’m afraid of is that the thing will get to be such a snap that the Big Operators will boost the score from 25 innings to a hundred!

  Of course, I plan to personally throttle Adolf Hitler if I get a chance. Aside from the heavy humor, I AM very much impressed by the record and achievements of this outfit, and I know damned well that I’m fortunate to be with it. They’re a great bunch of lads.

  Twenty-five missions was the goal. And his score turned out to be only ten. Plain statistics were shit, he thought as he flipped through the pages. Sixty Forts hadn’t returned from a raid to Schweinfurt one bleak October day, a few weeks before Marshall arrived at Molesworth.

  Bob Hadley came in from a mission the other day and had a fever and a bad cold. He reported to the Dispensary and was sent up to the General Hospital. The rest of us here in our pneumonia hole are in pretty good shape—with this eternally damp weather. It seems nearly impossible not to have a constant case of the sniffles.

  It was hard to write her after he came in from a long, tense flight, weak-headed from breathing straight O2 for hours, his body taut from leaning in to the throbbing yoke of the plane. The fatigue could not be cured by a two-day respite. Hadley had been hospitalized with a touch of anoxia, oxygen deprivation. Alone, Marshall bicycled through the English countryside, the domestic patchwork of fields only here and there revealing the wartime crisis with the barracks and control tower of an air base. He remembered discovering the remains of an old Roman road, then finding it on his map. He had written about it to Loretta in one of the V-mail letters, and he saw now where that detail had been censored out in heavy black ink. The blackout was pervasive, like the fog. Sometimes he was a worse censor than the official censors.

  He did not say that the English girls were so desperate for sex that they would have braved machine-gun fire to get to the GIs.

  Thought I’d forgotten your birthday, didn’t you? Well, I didn’t, so Happy Birthday, Darling! Wish I were there with you. I’d spank you on one end and kiss you on the other! You know, honey, sometimes I have the feeling that in one or two minor details I just might be falling short of the perfect man for you. One of those minor details is that even when I’m 80 years old and beginning to lose the bloom of youth, I’ll undoubtedly still get caught short on Christmases and your birthdays. So will you please forgive me for not giving you something for your birthday this year and get your present for you for me? (Should that be “for me for you”?) Preferably some of them swell black things with the black trimmings. When you put ’em on, think of me, and I’ll think of you putting ’em on.

  And on your next birthday I will attend to all that there stuff myself.

  Marshall was stunned. He didn’t recall writing such lovey-dovey letters. When he looked back, it was mostly aviation stuff he thought about.

  But he remembered the English girls.

  “These girls are wild!” said Al Grainger. Grainger had been cornered by a big-boned cutie at the dance the weekend before Christmas, when busloads of English girls arrived. Marshall quickly selected the first pretty girl he saw and zoomed across the room toward her, with his wing flaps down. She saw him coming and opened her arms. It was as if they were long-lost lovers reuniting on a railway platform. She was Millie, with a brother in the RAF, and between dances, they chatted about bombers. Then the phantom of Millie’s sweetheart off in the infantry on the continent of Africa came between them, and he saw that she wished he were her Christopher and not a lanky Yank. If it had not been for such thoughts, Marshall and Millie might have had a spontaneous coupling right there on the dance floor, while the band was playing “Frenesi.” It astonished him that anyone would attempt to imitate Artie Shaw on the clarinet. Some of the girls jitterbugged to “Frenesi” in a frenzy, whirling their skirts with abandon, burning off the gin they gulped between dances, trying to forget their faraway sweethearts. Marshall and Millie danced to the end of a slow song, bodies pressed tightly together, and he said, “Thank you. He’ll come back. Trust me.” They parted, and a bit later he thought perhaps she would interpret his words as Yankee arrogance—now that Uncle Sam’s flyboys were there to win the war for the English, she could be sure her boy lover would return.

  Ma chèrie,

  J’ai une femme et cinq fils!

  How am I doing, honey, with my French lessons? My college French is coming back to me. I’ve got a couple of pamphlets that I’m going to spend some of my spare time on, hoping, of course, that my linguistic accomplishments will be merely cultural and not of practical value.

  *

  Hello, honey,

  I just got back from the show here on the base. It was “Palm Beach Story,” with C. Colbert and J. McCrea. I thought it was pretty good, although a bit risqué for these ingenuous blue eyes of mine! This makes two nights in a row that I’ve patronized the post flickers.

  *

  I took some swell pictures today, baby, and I hope to be able to send you some prints. Just got off work a little while ago and I am dog-tired, plum worn out and exhausted. I’m going to make a quick trip to the mess hall and come back and climb into bed, and I hope no one wakes me until noon tomorrow.

  He took his old camera on one of the missions. He remembered patching a couple of pinholes in the bellows and polishing the lens. He wanted to get some action shots, but there wasn’t much action that day. He snapped Webb at the controls, then Webb snapped him, cigarette dangling from his lips, his helmet flaps loose. Out the window other planes in the formation were visible, like blackbirds. He didn’t know what happened to that picture.

  Hootie got 137 shillings out of a slot machine in the Club tonight.

  That’s about 29 bucks. Hootie has all the luck.

  *

  I made my debut as an extra in the motion picture business today. There’s a training film being shot here called “Target—Berlin,” and a bunch of us walked up and down (self-consciously) in front of the camera. Supposed to be crews going from briefing to the planes. I have to be up early tomorrow, so I may have a busy day.

  Marshall pored through the letters, trying to adjust his memories to the evidence. What a sentimental stripling he had been! What a stone-face he became later on. It surprised him to encounter that younger guy, cooking up sweet talk. After he and Loretta were wed and settled, maybe he thought he didn’t have to compose endearments anymore. He wondered if it had seemed no longer necessary then to try to go deeper in his heart. At Molesworth and during flight training, he was sociable enough and loved high jinks, but after the war, he tended to stand apart. He always told hi
mself that the sobering responsibility of flying for the airline and raising a family required a certain discipline.

  He thought again of Neil Armstrong. From what Marshall had read, Armstrong seemed to be the ultimate pilot. When the lunar lander’s computers failed, and it was running low on fuel, and the landing zone was unexpectedly full of huge boulders, Armstrong calmly maneuvered over the rocks to a safe spot. Armstrong’s attitude was Give me the job and I’ll do it. O.K., I did it. I landed on the moon. Here’s your moon rocks. Now leave me alone. Marshall liked that.

  HE THUMBED THROUGH the letters, recalling the pleasure of receiving word from Loretta, her chatter sustaining him from day to day. Her picture, propped on an upended fruit crate in his room, was like a poster of a movie star selling war bonds. Before each mission he tried to memorize one feature—her temples, a downy shadow on her cheek, her bangs, or her rolled-under hair, the top upswept and fastened with a barrette. Her upper lip had a slight kink on the left, like a deliberate sign of flirtation, but he knew it to be a scar, just a nick from flying glass, a broken glass on a kitchen floor when she was a girl. He had had to reassure her many times about the scar. It didn’t detract from her looks. It gave her character.

  In that cold, shoddy room in England, it was hard to look at her photograph, to be reminded of the sweet softness waiting for him stateside. It distracted him from the urgency of his job, fighting the damned war.

  His mind ricocheted between the movielike quality of the life he had reported in the letters and the life he remembered. Each time he read about an early rising the next day, he knew exactly which mission it was. An early rising meant staggering out in the predawn chill to the mess hall for the special mission-day breakfast with genuine eggs. Then came the briefings, followed by the jeep rides to the check stations. Memorizing maps. You never knew for sure that you were going on a mission until the runner tapped on your door and said simply, “It’s 0400 hours, breakfast at 0500.” But sometimes you had an inkling the day before that you were “going out amongst them,” as the saying went.

  The weather was so bad on his first mission, in December, that they had to land through the clouds and rain by the aid of magnesium flares on the ground. On that mission, his adrenaline shot up like nothing he had known before. Each mission had the same effect, more or less. On his third mission two planes were lost, and he remembered the feeling of emptiness when the stragglers didn’t appear by tea time. He hung around the runways with the other crews, scanning the sky. At mess, a frantic cheerfulness hid the dread. The winter darkness closed in on the empty, silent sky.

  The planes that didn’t return became abstractions. Guys he knew had simply disappeared, and he didn’t think about them again. Pilots sat far removed from consequences, anyway. Bombs didn’t really miss their targets and kill children at a skating rink, or dismember mothers in a park. You didn’t see bodies flying apart or hear the shrieks. You flew along, dropped your load, and flew away.

  THE ENGINES OF THE 747 were droning comfortingly in the night, as the passengers settled down to watch the movie. The captain made a brief visit seatside for obligatory pleasantries. “Glad to have you on board, old-timer.” The B-17 could have almost fit inside this luxury bus, Marshall thought. The bomber’s waist windows were open, and the fuselage rattled and shook. Riding through the formation’s churned-up air was like jouncing along a creek bed in a rattletrap Model A Ford. Cruising speed was about two hundred miles an hour, and it was a long way from England to the heart of Germany.

  Marshall flipped through the V-mail again. What a youngster he had been. He saw that at each stage of life a person reassessed the earlier stages, and a new perspective, almost a new identity, took form, as if the shifting views of the past were museum dioramas before him. He felt the power of ignorance, the drive of youth. Only oversexed young men could have fought that war. He was feeling nostalgia for a terrible time, and he didn’t know what this meant. He had gone to war with a willing heart. What did he want now?

  At Molesworth, he truly felt he was the hotshot pilot Loretta believed in. He knew the Messerschmitts and Focke-Wulfs wouldn’t get him. Other guys—immediately nameless and faceless—got shot down, but he wouldn’t. He believed this. He had to believe it, or he couldn’t have flown the next mission.

  After a mission, the Doughnut Dollies appeared, American girls in their Red Cross Club-mobile, their dull-green bus that paid its good-will visits to the flak-weary bomber crews. The girls’ hair was breathtakingly seductive, and with their cheerleader voices and plush warmth they were as alluring as any of the stars in the movies he saw at the Officers’ Club. All the crews ran for the hot coffee, the doughnuts—their reward, lovely girls offering their wares.

  One evening he was at a rooming house in Kettering with one of the American girls. “The Red Cross girls aren’t supposed to step out like this,” she said, giggling.

  “What your mama doesn’t know won’t hurt her,” he said.

  The girl, nameless in his memory, wore something lacy beneath her skirt. She cuddled with him for a long while before they went ahead. She said, “It’s good; it doesn’t matter. It’s all right, baby.”

  “Hold me close.”

  “Sure, baby.”

  He wanted her warmth. He wanted to be enclosed, blanketed with her soft flesh.

  “This is stupid to say,” he said, “but you’re soft like those doughnuts you bring. And sweet too.”

  She only giggled and didn’t mind. She smoothed and admired his shoulders; she deposited little breathy kisses all over his stomach. She sat up, hands on her hips, and said, “Let me be the girl on your bomber nose. You do have a girl on your plane nose, don’t you? You all do.”

  He laughed, but he wouldn’t utter the name Dirty Lily. She didn’t pry.

  When it was time to leave, she pulled on her stockings carefully, snapping them to the belts, straightening the seams, checking her look in the mirror. He thought he would not see her again. He was going to bomb Hitler to hell, and she was giving him energy for the job, obtained without regret or guilt or pain.

  She said, “Come to the Rainbow Corner whenever you get your pass to London. Ask for me. There’s always something going on there. And so much dancing! Some of these guys can dance all night. Ask for Miss—”

  After a mission to Bremen, he went to the Rainbow Corner, the Red Cross canteen, but he did not see her anywhere in the crowded room. He asked for her, but she wasn’t on duty. He gathered with the crowd around the radio for the news—nothing good. The news from the Pacific was abstract. The news from the Italian front was mostly about the ground war. It did not seem real either. He smoked a Woodbine cigarette with a girl named Julie. He had a Coca-Cola and a sandwich, talked to several Red Cross girls, then walked around London. The crowds were trundling along, busy and quiet. Umbrellas popped out a couple of times, but he strode on in the cold mist, past Saint Paul’s, Big Ben, the Parliament. Here and there he saw the unmistakable damage from the Blitz, and he wondered who might have been standing there as the Luftwaffe swung over, raining explosives. Seeing the destruction, he felt no qualms about bombing the bejesus out of Germany. As he ambled through St. James’s Park, near 10 Downing Street, he saw that the streets around Buckingham Palace were blocked, and he detoured over into Regent’s Park. Later, at a small tearoom, he noticed the pasty faces of the malnourished and sleep-deprived, hunched over their tea and biscuits. He felt disembodied, juggling several realities at once. He was an American pilot, among friends, allies; he was a stranger, yet a friend, with an overlapping history. He noticed admiring glances. But RAF pilots were jealous of the American flyers. One called out to him, “Hey, Yank!” Out in the slow traffic, the tall red buses seemed comical. He passed girls bundled in tired tweed, their hats worn close, their stockings thick and wrinkled. It was a cold day, one that made him wish for his soft fleece-lined bomber helmet, but he knew he appeared snappy in his Air Corps uniform, with his lieutenant stripes, his smartly creased trousers, hi
s shined winter shoes, his overcoat slung over his arm.

  He was self-aware, charged with purpose. That’s how he remembered his younger self, anyway. He was in the midst of the greatest undertaking in human history. He was in the middle of either the greatest victory or the greatest catastrophe ever known. Or both.

  NOW, ON A JUMBO JET to Paris, he wasn’t sure he remembered his youthful self any better than he remembered the Doughnut Dolly.

  Albert had denigrated Marshall’s war. He said America was imperialistic, that Truman shouldn’t have dropped the atomic bomb. On one occasion, Albert casually remarked, “Everyone knows the U.S. is the worst country on earth. I’m thinking of going to live in some foreign country where everything is real. Someplace in South America. Or India.” Marshall recalled staring with amazement at his son, who was on spring break from college.

  On that January day in 1944, when Marshall walked through St. James’s Park, the war was raging. The skies over Germany were filled with death. But in a way, Marshall and his buddies went to war as cavalierly as Albert entertained moving to Nepal.

  A scene arose in his memory. Years ago, when Albert and Mary were children, they were roller-skating up and down the sidewalk in front of their house in New Jersey. Rain began falling, and Marshall rushed out to close the windows of his car.

  “You’ll get wet, kids,” he said, but they didn’t seem to mind the rain.

  They rolled on down the sidewalk as though he were invisible and they were protected from him.

  MARSHALL WAS NO LONGER sure whether he had first been untrue to Loretta before Christmas that winter at Molesworth or after. He recalled an evening in Brington, on a pass after a mission to Kiel. He found himself in a room above a pub with an English girl, who didn’t volunteer her name, and he finally asked. Madge. It was an icy night, with icicles glinting in the fog. She had a brown paper parcel tied with string, something for “me mum,” she said. Under the dim light of a blackout bulb, they undressed each other clumsily. The poor illumination made her more attractive than she probably was.