The Girl in the Blue Beret Page 6

  After January 11, the mission to Oschersleben, it no longer seemed to matter if he was untrue to Loretta. But he hadn’t even flown that day. Marshall and his crew did not go out because the Dirty Lily had a fuel-line problem. They watched forty-one B-17s depart, and for the rest of the day they sweated out the mission with the ground crew.

  By tea time everyone’s nerves were on edge.

  As the first returning planes began to roll in, the jitters only intensified.

  “What’s the count?”

  “Twenty-seven, I think.”

  They watched and listened, long past tea time, but no other planes came. Four planes had aborted early. Ten planes were missing.

  Marshall imagined the lord of Lilford Manor having his tea, whether or not the planes returned. He shared his fancy house with a flock of nurses. Marshall had been to the place for a nurses’ dance. Long-legged Nurse Begley—where was she now?

  At mess, they heard a familiar rumbling, then the siren of the ambulance. They rushed out, mouths still full, to see who was coming home. It was not one of theirs but a Fortress from another base, a straggler that couldn’t go any farther.

  “At least somebody made it,” Marshall said when they returned to their quarters. “Whoever the hell they are.”

  One of his roommates, Al Grainger, threw his boots at the wall and said, “If I get back to the States alive, I’m going to fuck the first fifty girls I see, including the Statue of Liberty.”

  “Is she carrying a torch for you?”

  “I think so. I’ve lost my torch.”

  “It’s under your bunk.”

  Grainger rummaged beneath the bed and retrieved his flashlight.

  But all light was forbidden outside at night. He dropped the light on his bed, and they headed to the Officers’ Club to get drunk.

  “Where the hell is Oschersleben anyway?” asked Grainger.

  That night Marshall wrote to Loretta, Same old same old today. Trying to do my job. I’m starting to like English tea. I polished my shoes; etc., etc. Miss you badly, honey. Lights out now.

  “HIT ME,” MARSHALL SAID to the dealer. The snap-snap of cards distracted him from the roar in his ears left over from his pleasure jaunt over Bremen the previous day. He had been in the lead plane of his squadron, and he felt cocky. The losses on January 11 had made him angry, and he suspected that Webb was scared. Webb sat at the yoke mostly in silence, and he seemed unnerved when they neared the target. When he handed off control to the bombardier, he pressed his trembling hands on his knees. The landscape below was a dusty white, patches of snow below.

  Hootie couldn’t stop talking about a pilot named Gorman, who hadn’t come back from Oschersleben. Hootie, furtively regarding his cards, said, “What do you think—he could have escaped and gone over to someplace safe, some nice island with a white beach, nice sand. Good landing strip, long flat beach. He could be there, with women in little swimming-suits made out of feathers, and they could be gobbling coconuts and oranges.”

  “Ambrosia,” said Marshall. They looked at him. “Coconuts and oranges. My mother made it. It had bananas in it too.” He was recalling a dish so special, so rare, that it was like a taste of paradise. Ambrosia. Only at Christmas.

  “Yeah, bananas. A banana tree right there. Gorman would pick a banana and peel it back and put it in her mouth just so—” Hootie was demonstrating, but the laughter around him was hollow.

  “Knock it off, Hootie.” He was a goofball, always going off on a mental tangent.

  “You’ll get grounded, you keep rattling your mouth like that,” said a radio operator, a glum guy who never cracked a smile.

  “Who’s in?” asked the dealer.

  Guys like Gorman left and didn’t come back. They disappeared. A magic act—poof. There one day, gone the next. No one saw or heard what had happened. Poof.

  Marshall studied Loretta’s portrait, the flat, two-dimensional inanimate thing made of light and shadow, and wondered how he could possibly hold it dear. It wasn’t her. He should save her for later. If he succumbed too deeply now, he could be spiraling toward a tropical beach, with Gorman. He needed the sharp edges of his mind. He turned her facedown, like a playing card, on the rough wood of the fruit crate.

  That weekend everyone was drunk. A load of WAAFs was trucked in for the officers’ dance at the manor. They were auxiliary for the RAF, working with the crews on one of the nearby bases. Those women drove trucks, worked the radio, manned the check-in stations.

  “We do everything but drive the plane,” one told him. “But we steal flips—when a pilot’s going up at night for a little ride and wants to take somebody along. I always go. It’s grand.”

  “She’s got a stomach of iron, that one,” said a frowsy brown-haired girl. “I’m glad I’ve got my two feet planted.”

  Marshall danced with a tall gal called Sal, who was wearing her mother’s old rabbit wrap, with her hair slung up in a truck driver’s regulation pompadour. The American nurses danced in their jazzy uniforms. They had changed out of their bloodstained brown-striped seersucker nursing dresses.

  MARSHALL HAD BEEN scheduled to fly on January 29, but the fog pushed down on the planes as if it were a heavy weight, grounding them. It didn’t lift until nearly noon. The mission was delayed for two days.

  The morning of the thirty-first was clear, but the courier running from the weather station reported clouds toward Frankfurt by afternoon. In truth, you couldn’t think logically that far ahead. Marshall was eager to go. His mental wings were flapping like a migrating goose.

  The commander was Hornsby, a short, no-nonsense man with bulging eyes like a pug dog. Marshall had observed him coming out of the Officers’ Club late one night, pulling on his leather gloves as if he had a job to do that instant. He was walking with deliberation, almost scurrying, as if he couldn’t keep up with himself, as if his thoughts were racing ahead, his plans and schemes already airborne. He was a man who could envision and execute a swarming.

  For a swarming was what it was, when thirty or forty planes took off from Molesworth, one by one, and then circled and began to swirl into formation. Soon the crews could see other swirls around them, as other formations from other bases in England began to join in. Squadrons joined squadrons, becoming sixty-ship combat wings. Before long, there were nearly a thousand planes, from all the air bases in England, the Mighty Eighth Air Force of heavy bombers with their loads. It was intense, impossible to exaggerate, enormous. And later, when their fighter escorts arrived, hovering above, it was a truly colossal force.

  It was a sight the world would never see again, Marshall thought, those redoubtable goose-flock Vs hell-bent toward their target. Hundreds and hundreds of aircraft, clouds of them. The flyboys rode through the tangled currents of slipstreams for as long as eight hours, their adrenaline levels shooting sharp. The shudder and shake of the yoke—the little boy on his rocking horse, the high-hearted man mounting the anonymous woman.

  The men on the plane that day: Cochran, Campanello, Ford, Grainger, Hadley, Redburn, Stewart. Stone. Lawrence Webb. Hootie Williams.

  Hootie! The name still ripped his guts.

  WHEN HE RETURNED from the war and saw Loretta again, she expected him to propose to her in an old-fashioned way. He had arrived in Cincinnati on a troop train from Philadelphia, and she had taken the bus to Union Station. The grand dome of the station was so immense he felt like a toy soldier beneath it.

  “You’re the handsomest thing I ever saw in my life,” she cried. “Sweetheart, you’re all mine!”

  Her warmth flowed through him, promising to erase the recent past. He felt it slipping away, like a spiral movement in his mind.

  Her flirtatious manner seemed exaggerated, the bow on her hat whimsical, her giggle girlish. It was jarring, seeing this innocent, naïve girl. He was overwhelmed with joy to be with her, on U.S. soil again. The last months were fading into a dark dream. Yet she was a stranger, like somebody’s kid sister, altogether too silly and carefree to
take seriously. He had not seen a woman behave this way in months. This girl Loretta might have been going to taffy pulls.

  At the nearest soda fountain, crowded with GIs and their families and sweethearts, they had Cokes and he ate a genuine hamburger. The sumptuousness of the hamburger, paired with its sweet carbonated companion, sent him into a reverie. Here was this girl showering him with devotion. She was swinging from side to side on the spinning stool next to his. Her dress was white, with red polka dots, and the skirt flounced at the hem. She crossed her legs and deliberately showed her knees. She wasn’t petite like the French girls, he thought. He held her waist and stopped her singsong swinging. She sucked the straw of her Coke, leaving lipstick. He had kissed off all her lipstick, but she had reapplied it. It was bright red, for the polka dots of her dress.

  FROM CINCINNATI, HE MADE an obligatory visit to his relatives down in the mountains. The bus ride to Harlan was a strange, grim little trip. He found an uncle dying of lung disease and his wife unable to grow her garden because she no longer had the breath to climb the hill behind their dog-trot house. Marshall hated this place where the coal mines had destroyed his parents and grandparents. He had never wanted to go back there.

  If they had been worried about him during the war, no one said. They all said Marshall looked older. They wouldn’t have recognized him. No one wanted to hear about the war. His Uncle Jimmy refused to believe that Marshall had been a bomber pilot. His cousin Herman tried to get him to come back and work in the mines. One of his aunts accused him of gallivanting and pleasuring himself while his kinfolks needed him. His Aunt June Bug insisted on living alone after her stroke. His cousin Dan had moved to Richmond and was working at an ammunitions depot—doing what, no one could say exactly.

  Marshall knew he had been an oddball in that family for years because his parents had moved north to Ohio. After they died, he had lived with Aunt Shelby in Cincinnati and learned proper English in school. He would never have tolerated being teased the way some of the backwoods boys in the Army were. Marshall never apologized for seeking an education. He went to college for a couple of years before the war. What he wanted in Loretta was everything he didn’t find in his relatives. She listened to the Metropolitan Opera on the radio. She liked museums. She lectured him once on the historical significance of the gargoyles on the buildings in downtown Cincinnati. He liked seeing Loretta parade her culture. She had class. When he saw gargoyles on Notre Dame in Paris, they seemed almost like old friends.

  11.

  CAPTAIN VOGEL HAD BEGUN HIS INITIAL DESCENT INTO PARIS IN the early-summer dawn. It had been dark only briefly during the night, and Marshall dozed, Molesworth memories swirling in his mind. He always had trouble sleeping on an airplane. As soon as sleep shut down his hearing, he would awake with a jolt, thinking the engines had quit.

  When both his seat mates left for the lavatory, Marshall leaned across to the window, to see if the plane was flying over the Channel, as he had guessed. Spotting England’s familiar shore, he yearned for Molesworth. Molesworth was where he had lived up to his ideal of himself. Before everything fell apart.

  The morning they took off on the mission, their tenth, Marshall was making a secret bet with himself on how far he would get with Nurse Begley when he returned. Her front teeth were like Chiclets, shiny and squared off, and she framed them with bright lipstick the color of cherries—not pie cherries, but whiskey-sour cherries. She tasted more like pie, though. He was a fool. She was from out west, with bony hands and long legs and thick, radiant hair, and she had a habit of slinging her hip in a shooting stance. Her name was Annie, but the flyboys called her Nurse Begley because of her name tag bouncing on her chest. The formal name made it easier to mock their own lust for her and her great bazooms. Her name tag bobbed squarely atop the left one. Nurse Begley was Rita Hayworth in chestnut hair.

  Marshall had had his chance to impress Nurse Begley the night before. She had agreed to meet him outside Lilford Hall, where the nurses bunked. Lord Lilford hunkered in one wing of his place.

  “He’s probably down to a butler and three footmen,” Marshall joked.

  “We heard he sits in his basement with earmuffs on,” Nurse Begley said.

  “What? He doesn’t like airplanes outside his window?”

  “The noise of us nurses is probably worse,” she said with a laugh and a Hayworth toss of her hair. Her chest jiggled.

  “We take off right over his house.” Marshall grinned. “From the air, it looks like a toy palace in a train set.”

  “That’s nice, to think that his house might not be so grand,” she said. “Depending on how you look at it.”

  Nurse Begley was in her off-duty skirt and jacket, and her trench coat was unbuttoned. He backed her up against the ivy-covered wall of Lilford Hall, their bodies curving close.

  “What do you like to do at home?”

  “Do we have to talk about home?” she said, fondling his lapel.

  He kissed her deeply, jamming her into the rustling winter ivy.

  “Say—you want to give me a good-luck charm to take with me? Ten to one says I go out in the morning.”

  “What?” She was rummaging in her shoulder bag. “I need my hair clip, my lighter … Hmm.”

  “Knickers,” he said.

  Her giggles aroused him.

  “In the winter the English girls wear something they call woollies to keep them warm,” she said. “An English girl gave me some.”

  “That would be swell.”

  Thrilled, he watched as she wriggled out of the woollies, sliding them down her bare legs, crumpling them into a wad, and with a slight caress of his frontage, she tucked them into his pocket.

  “Good night, flyboy,” she said. “Good luck tomorrow.”

  He slept with his face in her woollies, and indeed they stayed roasty-toasty. In the morning, he stashed them in his leather flight jacket.

  “DROP YOUR COCKS and grab your socks, boys,” said the runner at 0400 hours. “Breakfast at 0500 hours.”

  The mess sergeant barked, “Combat eggs for breakfast. Load up, fellas. And pick up your sandwiches before you go. Nobody wants to be hungry in Germany.”

  “I’m not going to be in Germany, pal,” said Hootie. “I’m going to be over Germany.”

  Next, the Nissen hut with the big maps on the wall. The Nissen was a makeshift structure of corrugated metal where all that day’s crews crowded to learn the “Target for Today.” The room steamed with the body heat of flyers duded up in their leather jackets and bulky flight garb as the top brass unveiled the flight plan and the weather guy added his two cents’ worth. The big chalkboards listed each plane.

  When the target was revealed, there was a shocked silence, then nervous jokes and groans. As usual.

  “Send me to the rest home right now,” Grainger said to Marshall.

  The flyers watched the general with his pointer, the commanders, the couriers rushing in with news.

  The flyers rode to the equipment room to gather gear—chute pack, Mae West, flak suit—a bag of stuff big enough for a two-week vacation. Then the jeeps and trucks carried the flight crews out to the hardstands, where the ground crews were loading the bombs and making last-minute inspections.

  Next, Cupid’s leap—the contortionist act required to board a B-17. Marshall swung himself upward into the hatch opening of the Dirty Lily. Grab the rim with both hands, kick your legs up and in, then slide forward on your ass. One of the ground guys called, “See you at 1500 hours, Lieutenant.”

  The takeoff from Molesworth in the dawn was a spectacle. The planes lined up nose to tail on the taxiway and headed for the turn onto the runway. The flashing reflections off the planes taxiing ahead sometimes blazed like machine-gun fire. The roar of the engines was lyrical, like the thunder of a herd of young horses, spirited and healthy. Engines revving, the planes sashayed out in a long, slow file, waddling side to side. B-17s were tail draggers. For a better view over the noses, the pilots wriggled the planes si
deways—left, then right, left, then right. Under other circumstances, it might have seemed comical.

  As each plane reached the top of the runway, it turned, still rolling. Throttles went forward, the engines bellowed, and the ship raced into the air, following those ahead, with more coming just behind. Liftoff after liftoff, one every thirty seconds. They climbed out of the ground gloom into brilliant sunlight and began circling the field, maneuvering to establish their formation, each bomber slipping into its assigned slot.

  Marshall believed the B-17 was an elegant aircraft. He had been so young, so cocksure, he took it for granted that hundreds of heavy bombers could squeeze together in tight aerial patterns and fly long distances with no collisions, no peppering one another with all their bristling machine guns, no smashing one another with their long streams of deadly bombs. In training, he hadn’t yet grasped how stupefyingly harmonious a full operational mission would be—a thousand bombers hurtling through the sky as a single, immense, layered entity, a unified airborne fleet.

  The flight to Frankfurt was steady and routine—that is, nerve-wracking and physically exhausting. Marshall loved it. He loved that exuberance that came from the closeness of other Forts. Riding in the turbulence from the planes around them was exhilarating. He and Webb took turns holding position on the west ship’s wing tip. The physical effort to hold their plane in formation was like roping a steer and pressing it down for hour after hour. Working the throttles, constantly adjusting and readjusting speed, flicking their eyes from the instruments to the sky and back, kept them from thinking about the cold. The contrails from the planes ahead and above blew past in steady streams, chalk marks etching the sky. They were in the dazzling midst of a beautiful deadly force. Marshall was on the alert for unusual moves by the fighter escorts, the “little friends,” or some looming Nazi bastard. He needed the eyes of a fly, omnidirectional.