The Girl in the Blue Beret by Bobbie Ann Mason Page B

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, his 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.
    After January 11, the mission to Oschersleben, it no longer seemed to matter if he was untrue to Loretta. But he