26.
HIS MAIL CAME TO HIS APARTMENT NOW. IT ARRIVED IN A locked cubbyhole in the lobby. Mary sent photographs of a trip she had taken to the Olympic Peninsula, and Albert sent drawings of a landscape plan for revising Marshall’s backyard with ground covers. No one would have to mow! he explained. Loretta would have had a fit, Marshall thought. Ground covers bring snakes, she would say.
He had received a couple more letters from the crew, in answer to his letter about visiting the crash site, and today he heard from Bob Hadley, his erstwhile escape partner. Hadley wrote from California, saying it had never occurred to him to return to the crash site, but he was glad that Marshall was searching for his helpers. Hadley wrote, “I didn’t know the name of the family that sheltered me in Paris. I didn’t stay there long, because everybody was starving in Paris.” He had no reaction to Marshall’s account of the boy’s father who was killed. But he was wondering if Marshall had written to Hootie Williams’s family. Hootie was single, and no one in the crew had kept in touch with his parents. Marshall thought about the Hootie he had known at Molesworth. He could whip the pants off everybody at poker. He could hold his liquor. He could sew. He could probably do magic tricks. Hootie always came up with something unexpected—and the last thing anyone expected was that he would lose his life.
Marshall opened a small package from Kansas, thinking it was from another of his crewmates, the flight engineer, James Ford. But the writer was James’s daughter, Sonia.
My father is ill and cannot reply to your letter, but he wanted me to send you this tape recording he made about his experience in France after your plane crashed. It wasn’t until last year, when he was told he had lung cancer, that he decided to make this recording for my brother and me. When he was able to share his account it brought us closer together as a family, and we wouldn’t trade anything for this. I’m a nurse in a psychiatric ward and all I hear all day is far-fetched stories. But this tape tells a story that is both fantastic and true, and it is one I cherish. My mother did not live to hear it, but I have a feeling she did know some of it before she went. Dad sends you his best wishes, and he remembers with gratitude how you pulled him out of the plane.
Marshall did not remember pulling Ford from the plane. Webb was lying in the dirt. Ford and Marshall together had hauled him out of the plane. Marshall had been over these memories so often that they had become only memories of memories.
He wrote a brief letter to Sonia Ford. He tried to remember if Ford was a smoker. They all were. He couldn’t listen to the tape recording until he added a tape recorder to his Parisian furnishings. But maybe he didn’t want to hear another version of the tale. The rendezvous with Gordon Webb had been unnerving, and it was playing in his mind still.
He was settling into his new, perhaps temporary, life. He made small talk with the grocer, the laundress, the butcher, the guy named Guy at the Everything Store. He tried to remember to carry a string bag for his purchases. The baker kindly sawed a loaf in half for him, saying a single person would let the bread go stale. Marshall had not always paid such attention to the small tasks of daily life, but it pleased him to economize. He remembered the Depression. He didn’t like extravagance. He was making nearly a hundred thousand dollars a year before he retired, and now with his pension and without Loretta, he had more than he needed.
But what did he think he was doing? He walked and walked. If he was really serious about finding Robert and the Vallons, he should be out doing research, he told himself. Instead, he was depending on Nicolas. He didn’t know what to do. Gordon Webb was flitting back and forth across the Pond and acting like it was a dipshit job. Marshall would have been happy to be in that seat, even as a co-pilot.
On the boulevard Montparnasse he saw an aged woman with pinched eyes and a doughy face holding out a bowl for coins. She was swathed in black, stooped, breathing with difficulty, agony on her face. She could be a war widow from World War I, he thought. And she would have lived through the Occupation. He recalled the women in black who had taken care of him. What this woman could tell him! He found change in his pocket and dropped it into her bowl.
Don’t put your hands in your pockets! Don’t jingle your change! That is what Americans do. Did his guide on the train warn him about that? Lebeau?
He didn’t speak to the old woman, but walked on, troubled. He saw so few beggars, just the cluster of clochards by the Seine.
NICOLAS TELEPHONED TO REPORT abysmal luck with the National Archives and the library.
“All day I searched. The Résistance. The Bourgogne. The RAF, the Free French, the U.S. Army Air Force. It is just as I feared—everything I wanted is classified! Even now, after so long a time.” Marshall could visualize Nicolas’s boyish gestures, his hand tapping his head, flailing the air, forming a fist toward the ceiling. “They have buried our history, Marshall. We are adrift.”
Marshall was apologetic. “I don’t mean to waste your time.”
“No matter. It should not be so hard to find a résistant,” Nicolas said. “They’re so proud of what they did. But the collaborateurs—pfft—no!”
Nicolas had learned nothing more about Lebeau or the Bourgogne line, so he urged Marshall to try the épicerie in Saint-Mandé again. “I have a strong suspicion he is the person you remember at the Vallons. Good luck with talking to the daughter.”
“I’ll try to be more courteous this time,” Marshall said. He wasn’t sure he was ready to face that spitfire again.
The picture in his mind was growing clearer. A young guy riding a bicycle into Paris from the country, a goose hiding in the basket. The breeze ruffled his hair as he pedaled past a German convoy. He was singing.
“Whenever you find your résistant, I am certain he will welcome you,” Nicolas said. “Meanwhile, Marshall, I will search more around Chauny for people who might recall something about those who helped you before you came to us.”
“The women in black.”
“Oui.”