The Girl in the Blue Beret (25 page)

“I’ll go with you,” he said. “I need to leave.”

“
Non, non, et non!
Come with me and then we will return.”

She fumbled with the leash, murmuring to the dog as if she was sharing intimate secrets. The sounds blurred—her key in the door, the jingle of the leash, her whispering to Bobby.

Her walk was something of a prance, the self-aware gait of a woman who had a man’s attention. It was dark in the small park they passed. Marshall found himself praising Bobby’s absurd little
merde
production. Robert Jules Lebeau was going through his mind, flip-flopping images of hateful man and good man.

“It’s too early for you to go home,” she said.

“I’m an old man. I get tired,” he said.

She touched his arm. “I would make you coffee.”

“No. Thanks. Really.”

“Are you bothered with me?” she asked as they turned down a broad street.

“I’m sorry. I’m just finding it so hard to get the story about your father straight in my mind.”

She didn’t reply for a moment.

“He was not a father to me,” she said.

“No.”

“Let’s stop at this café,” she said, tugging his arm. The tables were not crowded, but on the sidewalk a woman with a stroller of twins in pink rolled by, almost nipping his foot. It seemed late to see babies being strolled.

Marshall and Caroline sat at a sidewalk table in a splotch of neon light. They ordered two coffees. Her face seemed brittle in the glare. He thought he could see a trace of Robert in her features.

She smiled up at him. “It is very nice here, no?”

“Yes.”

“Marshall, I realize I have been very mysterious on the subject of my father. I don’t think about him. He is not important.” She sighed. “But I will tell you what you want to know.”

The coffee arrived. Marshall tested his, but he didn’t want it. He would never get to sleep. Caroline’s hands covered her face. The dog, in her lap, moaned and tried to wriggle between her hands, to lick her face.

“There is such bitterness,
monsieur
,” she said to Marshall.

“Not so formal,” he said. “I’m not an old man.”

“You just said you were?”

“I didn’t really mean it. I am an innocent in a foreign land.”

“And you want to dig up the past.” Her eyes avoided his.

“I apologize. I’ve been much too forward.” He tried to soothe her. He reached across the table, at the risk of being snapped at by Bobby. The light on Caroline’s face was harsh.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve troubled you. Drink your coffee, and we’ll talk another time.”

Caroline sipped her
café noir
. She said, “No. Let me tell you about my father right now. Let us conclude this matter.”

33.

“I
T WAS SO LAMENTABLE,” SHE SAID. WHEN SHE WAS YOUNG, HE
was kind. He came every Wednesday evening, like a Father Christmas, bringing oranges or peaches or asparagus, something in season. He presented them as gifts, twisted in newspaper inside an old basket. He came in singing, and he petted each of the children, in turn, according to size. She was the middle child of the five, and as the family grew, his basket became larger. He drew amusing pictures for them. He taught them songs, for he was always singing, and he knew the children’s songs, the folk songs, the
chansons
, the religious songs. When they grew older he recited poetry—Verlaine, she remembered.

When he sang “Dans le silence de la nuit,” he might have been a choir angel, the melody in his voice was so sweet. But he drank too much, and his behavior was unpredictable. Gradually, his visits became erratic and unpleasant. She couldn’t say when the change began. He gushed over the children and sloshed his wine on everything, including their heads. Late one evening when she was about ten, he arrived very drunk. The younger children were in bed, and she was reading. He entered her mother’s bedroom. She heard shouting and crying. She was used to their loud noises, but this was different. Her mother was crying, and Caroline could make out some of the words. Her mother was insisting that he couldn’t do something or other, pleading. “No, no, no,” she said. Caroline’s young mind trembled in fear of her father, who had sung the
chansons
so sweetly.

She heard her mother say, “I beg you, tell me how I can live with this.”

“You have nothing to do with it!” he cried in a high voice.

“You cannot go on like this.”

“This is the way I am.”

“No, it does not have to be.”

Caroline went to comfort her two little brothers, who had awakened. The cuckoo clock on the wall had not worked in years, but suddenly, as the voices in the bedroom grew louder, the cuckoo strutted out of its hole and gave two loud cuckoos, as if to say
“Chut!”
Shut up.

Caroline believed the cuckoo was an omen. As her parents continued to argue, she could bear no more, and she burst into her mother’s bedroom. Her father stood there, on one side of the bed, with her mother on the other, against the wall. They were fully dressed, and when she entered, their faces dropped, their voices lowered, and her father said, “Hello, my little artichoke.”

“Yes, did you say your prayers?” her mother said.

Her father patted her on the head, waved goodbye to her mother, and left the apartment.

After that night, he came less often. Then his visits stopped altogether. On Wednesdays the boys asked where the basket of surprises was. It was a long time before they discovered that their mother had been going to visit Robert in the hospital. She would not take the children to see him. His wife and their children visited him on Sundays, and Caroline’s mother visited on Saturday afternoons. Caroline heard later that it was a psychiatric hospital, where he had shock treatments to dull his skewered mind, but her mother would not confirm this rumor. After he was released, she managed to keep him away from the children. There was a calmness around the apartment then.

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 had to wait for Nicolas to call back. Marshall had slept late again—insomnia lasting till dawn—and had been dreaming of cranes migrating, their necks stuck out straight like jet fuselages.

Robert must be dead, Marshall had decided. If his body was still alive, his spirit was gone. Marshall was sure Caroline had told him the truth. And he was repelled by the thought of pursuing the broken wreck of the gallant young man he had known, if only fleetingly. Marshall knew he was overreacting, but the wave of revulsion was overwhelming. It was pointless, perhaps even perverse, to keep hunting for people he had known long ago, in a wholly different world. He should stop, pack up, go home. Home?

“She’s alive? Annette?”

“It is true.”

“I’m …” Marshall cast about for words. “I don’t know what to say. How did you find her?” He hardly knew if he was awake.

“We were searching in Paris, but she lives in a village southwest of Angoulême, in the Charentes. Her name now is Bouyer.”

“Bouyer? Are her parents still alive?” Marshall couldn’t collect his thoughts.

“I don’t know,” said Nicolas. “I spoke to her, but she didn’t mention her family. Listen, Marshall, she is eager to see you. At first she seemed hesitant, and I wasn’t certain that she remembered you, but she spoke with great eagerness after I explained to her how my family knew you. She was very gracious then, as if I had used a password!”

Two days earlier, Marshall had telephoned Nicolas about the disappointing end to his search for Robert Lebeau. He didn’t feel like tracking down someone at a mental institution, he had said. Now he said, “Nicolas, you are like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat.”

“I should have accomplished this much sooner, but I foolishly followed some false trails.”

Marshall rose from bed and stood by the window. Across the street several similar cars nested in a row. A small truck was backing into a narrow space. He took a deep breath. He was awake now.

Nicolas apologized for limiting his search to Paris. “I found her through another
résistante
in the Bourgogne line, a woman who knew her and had seen her in Paris a few years ago. She should have been easy to find, because so many
aviateurs
have stayed in touch with the people who helped them. I must tell you that I was deeply afraid the Vallons had met a bad fate, and I was overjoyed to locate your Annette.”

Annette had suggested that Marshall come on Wednesday afternoon for tea, and Nicolas had the directions for getting there.

“The train to Angoulême is simple,” Nicolas said. “I would drive you, but it is necessary to tutor my pupils.”

“Thanks, Nicolas. Don’t worry. I think I’ll rent a car down there and go exploring.”

Marshall scribbled down Annette’s telephone number and promised to come to Chauny soon for Sunday lunch.

35.

I
T FELT GOOD TO HANDLE A VEHICLE AGAIN. FROM THE TRAIN
station at Angoulême, in a boxy Citroën with a balky choke, he headed toward Cognac, an affluent town near the Atlantic coast. After Angoulême, the expanse of vineyards opened out—the grapevines responsible for cognac, the fine brandy that Marshall never drank but that was plentiful in the dollhouse bottles served to airline passengers. The vines were in full growth, twisting and hugging close together, supported by wires and pruned at the top into flat hedge roofs. Grapes. How did anyone take an interest in something so specific and yet so broad? Of course he knew that for the workers vineyards were like the coal mines—not a choice, usually, just an ineluctable fate.

He was afraid she wouldn’t really remember him from 1944. In a brief conversation on the telephone the day before, she had been cordial, and although he still pictured her as the girl in his memory, her voice was high-pitched and unfamiliar.

Following the directions she had given him, he left the main route to Cognac and drove south a few miles to the sign for her village. It was a small farming community, with no trace of commerce or wealth. Slowly, he followed several turns until he found the street, then parked at #4, a large wooden portal, arched at the top. There was a smaller door with a bell rope. After pulling the bell and hearing its distant interior clang, he glanced around. It was a quiet street, like a back alley. He saw a field and a couple of gardens. Opposite, a lone white dog paced inside a fence.