At 60, after a lifetime in the sky, widowed pilot Marshall Stone finds himself grounded by mandatory retirement. Lacking any hobbies or a close relationship with his grown children, he's not entirely sure what he's supposed to do with the rest of his life.
“Asking a pilot to stop flying was like asking a librarian to burn books. Or a pianist to close the lid forever.... His mind entertained new metaphors every day.”
The day before his final flight for the airlines, he revisits the site where his B-17 bomber crashed in Belgium in 1944. Marshall had always regarded it as the “site of his past failure.” But to his surprise, the villagers still remember the incident and treasure the memory of the aviators they hid from the Germans. To his horror, he discovers that one man was shot helping the crew of the Dirty Lily.
After the war, aside from a thank-you note, Marshall had never really connected with the people who saved him. In fact, he had done his best to forget all about it. “In the years after, he didn't probe into the aftermath. He lived another life.” Marshall, in fact, also kept that other life at an arms-length, preferring the view from 30,000 feet up – where no messy emotions were visible. “He had always been like a special guest in this house, someone who dropped in every week or so…. Home life had air of pretense, as if staged. When he was away, did [his wife] strike the set?”
Marshall returns to Europe to try to find the rest of the families who sheltered him for months before he made it over the Pyrenees to Spain. The title character was the school-aged daughter of one of the families, who would skip through Paris past the occupying Germans, leading pilots to their safe houses. His search is hampered by decades, old code names, and the younger generation's desire to forget all about the war.
Mason, a PEN-Faulkner-winning writer who usually sets her books in her native Kentucky, based The Girl in the Blue Beret on the experiences of her father-in-law. Ordinary French citizens rescued some 3,000 downed American pilots, she writes, knowing they would be shot or sent to a concentration camp if caught. Marshall and the other pilots didn't make it easy on their saviors: they were too tall, had terrible accents, and held their cigarettes wrong. Even Marshall's boots betray him: there's a terrifyingly funny scene on a train when he realizes he's been leaving footprints stamped “USA” behind him for weeks.
Mason takes her time with “The Girl in the Blue Beret,” offering up a richly told tale that gives its main character a chance to relearn what it means to be a hero.
