The Way the Crow Flies Page 15

  “It’s a woman who’s sick in the head,” answered Mimi flatly. “Where did you hear that word?”

  Madeleine replied, in the aggrieved tones of the wrongfully accused, “I read it in Time magazine!”

  “Lower your voice. Jack? What’s she been reading?”

  Jack said he figured it was about time to plug in the television set. Madeleine cheered and ran outside to find her brother.

  When Jack adjusted the rabbit ears, not one but three channels came in clear as a bell, a fourth snowy but watchable. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation—CBC—and three from New York State: NBC, ABC and the fuzzy one, CBS.

  Maman’s rule: “There’s to be no eating dinner in front of the TV in this house.”

  Dad’s: “There’s to be no TV while the sun’s shining outside.”

  Then the whole family settled in to watch Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color, in black and white.

  For Madeleine, it is exquisite agony to watch the child actors who befriend the curious and resourceful young cougars and stray dogs. She burns as boys in dungarees become trapped in abandoned mine shafts, and girls nurse injured horses back to blue-ribbon health. How did those kids get to be in those shows? How can I get there? They are American, for one thing.

  “When you’re older you can move to Hollywood and become an entertainer,” says her father. But Madeleine doesn’t want to wait. She yearns for a career now. In show business. It keeps her awake at night. Television fuels the flames. Bob Hope and Bing Crosby in their striped jackets, straw hats and canes, cracking jokes and tap dancing. George Jessel and his cigar. Baleful Rodney Dangerfield, sorrowful Red Skelton; Don Rickles barking, Phyllis Diller carping, Anne Meara deadpanning, Joan Rivers rasping, Lucille Ball wailing. Madeleine doesn’t get most of the jokes but she gets the big thing, which is: they are funny.

  Afterwards, in bed with a book, the spell of television feels remote compared to the journey into the page. To be in a book. To slip into the crease where two pages meet, to live in the place where your eyes alight upon the words to ignite a world of smoke and peril, colour and serene delight. That is a journey no one can end with the change of a channel. Enduring magic. She opens Peter Pan.

  The intoxication of television, the passion of new friendship, the yearning for Neverland and the smell of new clothes on the racks at Simpson’s in downtown London, Ontario. All combine and accelerate to lift and spin her through the last weekend before school.

  After back-to-school shopping in London, the McCarthys buy a picnic lunch at the big Covent Market building in the centre of town. Wurst and Brötchen from the Bavarian Delikatessen, where the ruddy-cheeked owners make a gratifying fuss over Madeleine and Mike. The smell of smoked meats and cheeses, fresh bread and mustard—it’s the smell of a Sunday drive through the Black Forest, right here in southern Ontario.

  “Small world,” says Jack, when he finds out that the store owners knew the German bartender at the officers’ mess in 4 Wing. Son of a gun.

  They eat their picnic at Storybook Gardens. A park at the edge of town, on the Thames River, it resembles a miniature Disneyland. There is a wooden castle with drawbridge and a little choo-choo train that runs on a real track and carries passengers under twelve around the park. There are life-size figures from nursery rhymes—the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker rock in their tub, Humpty Dumpty teeters on his wall, a dish runs away with a spoon. A big bad plaster wolf threatens three real live pigs who root about and live in miniature houses of brick, wood and straw, and a life-size witch smiles from the door of her candy-coated house. Unlike the Pied Piper, there is no room for hope that the witch may be good after all. Madeleine is disconcerted by the conspicuous absence of Hansel and Gretel. It implies that either the witch has succeeded in eating them, or they have yet to arrive; in which case, “Come here, little girl, you’ll do very well.” On the grounds there is also a greenhouse with tropical flowers, of interest only to adults.

  When they return to the parking lot, a sticker has been applied to the rear bumper of the Rambler. Mimi finds it presumptuous—nothing like that would happen in Europe. Madeleine gazes at the sticker: bright yellow, it features the turreted outline of Storybook Castle and the path leading up to it, paved like Dorothy’s yellow brick road.

  On their way home, Jack takes the opportunity to happen onto Morrow Street.

  “Why are we turning here?” asks Mimi.

  “Just getting the lay of the land. You never know, we might want to retire here one day.” He feels Mimi’s hand stroke the back of his head, and he slows as they pass a yellow brick low-rise at the end of a leafy cul-de-sac. Number 472. Manicured lawn and hedge, kidney-shaped flower beds. Mums. A circular drive leads to the front doors, which are sheltered by a porte cochère.

  “I don’t know if I’m ready for that kind of excitement yet,” says Mimi.

  The place is like a mausoleum. Perfect. As the building recedes in the rearview mirror, Jack feels a butterfly stir in his stomach. He says, “Who wants ice cream?” A cheer goes up in the back seat.

  “Jack,” says Mimi, “we’ve had a lot of treats today already.”

  But it’s too late. From the back seat, Madeleine chants, “I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream!” Mimi raises an eyebrow at her husband. Madeleine continues: “‘Are you tired and listless? Take Dodd’s Little Liver Pills for fast, effective relief.’”

  Mimi and Jack exchange a look, suppressing a laugh. She says to her daughter in the mirror, “I hope you listen half so well in school this year.”

  REMEMBER-WHENS

  ON SUNDAY MORNING, Jack gets through the sermon at Mass by recalling Mimi in bed last night. Madeleine gets through by imagining how she would go about scaling the interior walls to the ceiling. Jack calculates in his mind how much he would need to put aside every week in order to buy his wife a mink coat. Every Christmas she warns him, as she prepares to unwrap her presents, “It better not be a you-know-what,” and throws the box at him if he has spent too much on her. She always throws the box, and sometimes weeps if it is just trop beau. What better thanks could a man hope for? It’s difficult, however, to squirrel away money when your wife is the comptroller of the family. Madeleine tugs the strangulating organza at her neck and imagines escaping on a motorcycle with Steve McQueen through a hail of bullets. “… Go in peace,” says the priest.

  “Come here, Mimi.”

  “Jack, what are you doing?”

  “On your feet, woman.”

  “Oh Jack.” And they dance. Three o’clock on Sunday afternoon. The priest has just left. He was here for brunch, and now Jack has put the soundtrack to South Pacific on the hi-fi.

  “Let’s get outta here,” Madeleine says to Mike.

  “Come here, you.”

  “Dad!” And she dances with her father.

  “You dance divinely, Missy.”

  “Sissy,” Mike rhymes from the couch, for which he gets a look from Jack. A complicit look that says, being a gentleman is part of being manly even though it might seem sissyish now.

  Madeleine lowers her eyes, not to look at her feet but to hide her delight as she lifts one hand to her father’s shoulder and places the other in his. When she was little she used to put her feet on his, but she is older now and her new patent-leather Mary Janes step in time with his Daks. She is still in her lacerating dress of pink spun glass, but has ceased complaining because Maman keeps telling her to offer up her suffering for the poor souls in purgatory. How many years off one’s time in the purifying flames can be bought by eight-year-old girls in scratchy dresses? The saving grace of this getup is Madeleine’s white Communion gloves: ribbed on the back like Bugs Bunny’s. Nyah, offer it up, doc. That was flippant, sorry, dear God.

  Jack says to her, “That’s it, don’t think about it, just relax and feel the music.” They sweep together gracefully around the coffee table and he sings along softly with “Some Enchanted Evening”…. Mimi joins in.

  “Mike
, dance with your mother,” says Jack.

  “Voulez-vous danser, maman?” And he offers her his hand.

  “Que t’es beau, Michel.” Mimi resists kissing her son and they dance. She is teaching him to lead.

  She puts on a big-band record she bought in nurses’ training in Montreal. Chick Webb and his orchestra. Demon on the drums. “Time to cut the rug,” she says, pushing back the coffee table.

  They watch their parents jive, dangerously close to the crystal roosters from Spain, perilously grazing the oil painting of the Alps, rattling the end tables where the Hummels share pride of place with the Royal Doultons.

  Mike and Madeleine take turns being whipped around like spaghetti at the end of their mother’s arm—she looks fiercely serious one second and the next she is laughing like a teenager—at times like this, she seems more like a babysitter than their mother. “It’s a wild party!” shouts Madeleine, and she and Mike dance in a frenzy, wash-the-dishes-dry-the-dishes-turn-the-dishes-over! Dad laughs until his face turns red and his gold tooth flashes. He snaps a picture. Maybe this Christmas we’ll get a home movie camera.

  After supper, a solemn rite. To do with love and loss. The loss of the past, and its transformation into precious memory. This alchemical feat always includes popcorn.

  There is nothing so persuasive to deep recall as the hum of the slide projector in the dark. The audible fuzz that follows each colour slide as it sh-clinks into view. The longer ago the picture, the longer the moment of silence before Dad’s cheerful voice in the dark: “That was a beautiful day, remember that day, Maman?”

  A picnic among the pines of the Schwarzwald. Maman sitting on the plaid blanket, legs folded sideways, sunglasses and white kerchief. A tenderer-looking Mike, Madeleine with her long braids, squinting at the camera.

  Sh-clink. It is not remembering so much as not forgetting. Madeleine contemplates the slides intently. Reverently. Each is an emblem of a vanished world. A doorway in a mountain, sealed forever.

  Sh-clink. Monaco. The pink palace where Princess Grace lives. “That was the day I broke my heel and you got so mad at me,” Mimi says to Jack. Certain things must be remembered after each slide. The pastry we had there, Madeleine got lost on the beach here—“I wasn’t lost, I went for a walk.”

  “That was one of the nicest holidays ever, remember, kids?”

  Sh-clink. Camping on the Riviera. Jack’s crumpled straw hat and four-day growth of beard. “The best accommodation in Europe costs you either a thousand francs or five.”

  Sh-clink. “The fruitcake!” Grandmaman’s fruitcake, which had been mailed from Canada the previous Christmas and took a whole year to arrive. Still moist and rummy. “A piece of that fruitcake every day, boy, I tell you you’d live forever,” says Jack, as he always does.

  “That was one of the nicest Christmases ever, remember, Jack?” says Mimi.

  “I remember.”

  Sh-clink. Alberta. “How’d that one slip in there?” says Jack. A tiny bundled Madeleine in a baby carriage perched atop a snowbank.

  “I remember that,” she says.

  “You do not,” says Mike.

  “Do so!”

  Sh-clink. Hameln. They have not looked at this slide before, so there are no comments that go with it yet. It is of Madeleine and Jack standing in front of the statue of the Pied Piper.

  “There’s Uncle Simon.”

  Jack says, “Where?”

  Madeleine gets up and points at the screen, where a shadow spills across her father’s trouser leg and the skirt of her dress—the silhouette of head and raised elbows. Simon, taking the picture.

  This is one thing Madeleine has on Mike; she has met Simon. He taught their father to fly. He told her to call him “Uncle.” He is a decorated veteran. He laughed at everything she said and asked her to come work for him. He did not look exactly like David Niven but that’s who she has come to associate him with—the kind of dashing grown-up who might offer you a cocktail and think nothing of it. He said, “The best spy of the Second World War was a woman, did you know that?” And told her about a member of the French Resistance, Jeannie Rousseau—pronounced “Johnny.” “Do you know what her code name was?”

  “No.”

  “It was ‘Madeleine.’”

  She smiled shyly but she could feel her destiny stirring.

  Johnny told the Allies about Hitler’s secret weapon. “The V-2 rocket,” said Uncle Simon. “That’s why we were able to bomb their factory.”

  “Operation Hydra,” said her father. “You were in on that show, weren’t you, Si?”

  Simon just smiled and said, “I and a few others.” Then he looked back down at Madeleine. “We’d never have been able to do it without Johnny.”

  “Did you know her?” asked Madeleine.

  “I’m afraid that’s classified, old girl.” And he laughed.

  Sh-clink. Blank.

  “Time for bed, kids.”

  “Aw Dad,” says Mike, “can’t we just have one more tray? Can we just see the hockey slides?”

  The boring hockey slides from Cold Lake, Alberta. Backyard rinks and arenas and Mike and his friends with frozen snot, poised over their hockey sticks, no girls allowed. “Not the hockey, Mike!” Madeleine is suddenly savage.

  “Temper down, now,” says Dad gently.

  “Yeth, the hockey,” says Mike. “He shootth, he thcores! He-he-he-HA-ha!”

  Mike can’t even do Woody Woodpecker—“Shut up!” she screams.

  “Allons, les enfants, c’est assez!”

  “Come here, old buddy.” And she goes to him. He picks her up. She hooks her pajama legs around his waist. She is too old to be carried upstairs to bed; she is so delighted and mortified that she mashes her face against his shoulder, but not before glimpsing Mike mouth the word “baby” at her, with his eyes crossed.

  “Tell me a story, Dad,” she says, using as mature a voice as possible.

  “It’s late, old buddy, you have to be fresh as a daisy tomorrow to start grade four.”

  Four. A benevolent number, brown and reasonable. Her school dress and ankle socks are laid out over a chair with her new shoes on the floor. It’s as though she herself had sat down in the chair and disappeared, leaving only her clothes.

  “Just one story, Dad, please.” She still has her arms around his neck from when he leaned down to kiss her good night, he is her prisoner.

  “Just one,” he says.

  “Tell me the story of the crash.”

  “Why do you want to hear that again, why don’t we read….” And he reaches for her Treasury of Fairytales.

  “No Dad, the crash.” This is not a once-upon-a-time type of evening.

  “All right then. But after that, schlafen.”

  There are some stories you can never hear enough. They are the same every time you hear them—but you are not. That’s one reliable way of understanding time.

  He sits on the edge of her bed. “It was right here in Centralia….”

  The story of the crash is already changing with you; it used to begin, It was on a little training station called Centralia, way out in the back of beyond.

  “I was flying lead in formation….” At the controls of his Anson trainer. Getting ready to join a bomber stream sixty miles long over the English Channel.

  Madeleine rests her cheek on the pillow and gazes at his belt buckle, a fly perfectly preserved in amber. It’s good to gaze at an object and listen to a story.

  “I was coming in for a landing….” In a month he’d be flying ops. At the controls of a Lancaster bomber—a real beauty of a beast. Suited up in full gear complete with Mae West—the buxom life-preserver for those fortunate enough to bail out over water.

  “I was on final approach….” Four other aircraft were set to land after him. Normally he would have a small crew in training on board but that day he was alone.

  “I was flying the old twin-engine Anson….” A very forgiving little aircraft, unless you’re ground-looping on the ta
rmac—lovely in the sky, but a handful on the ground.

  “The sky was clear as a bell….” It’s overcast but the ceiling is high, visibility good. Most pilots will fly their missions in clear moonlight over the Channel, slow and heavy with six tons of bombs to put on the target five hours away. They’ll see their own shadows rippling across the grey sea below while watching for German fighters, Messerschmitts mainly, as the crust of Europe comes into view: patchwork fields and spires below like a diorama, visibility augmented by the criss-crossing cones of German searchlights, by the flames of each other’s airplanes caught in the sticky web of light, the spritz and arc of anti-aircraft fire. And far below, their bombs tilting away, tumbling like dominoes toward earth, ending in soundless puffs of smoke. Some will make it back to Yorkshire—better to be hit on the way back, with less fuel and an empty bomb bay. If they’re lucky enough to be hit but remain airworthy, they might be able to put out the flames by diving. If not, and they’re lucky enough still to be alive, they and their crew might be able to squeeze past the equipment that crowds the narrow cabin and try to get out, climbing up the aircraft as it spins earthward. They rarely think about this. No one talks about it.

  “I got clearance from the tower, so I banked left and started bringing her in for a landing….” This time next month I’ll be in England.

  “Down below on the tarmac I saw another Anson rolling away from the flight line, and I took it for granted he was headed for the taxiway….” The airstrips are black with recent rain but it isn’t raining now, a bit slippery, no big deal. His worst fear has been that he will be sentenced to instructor school rather than posted overseas—the trick is to be good, but not too good….

  “At about a hundred and fifty feet I saw the Anson roll past the taxiway and turn onto the runway right smack dab where I was headed….” Unconcerned as a bug on a leaf, the yellow aircraft below makes a slow right turn onto the runway and begins to pick up speed. “And I said to myself, what the heck is he doing?” Something’s fouled up. “But there wasn’t much time to think….” Too late for Jack to go around again, and at one hundred feet a decision occurs in his central nervous system, causing his hand to pull up hard and lean right on the stick. “I figured I’d pour on the power, bank and get the nose up….” His aircraft responds with sixty degrees to the left but no altitude; he is too low and slow for that at fifty feet. His port wing clips the edge of the landing strip, he cartwheels into the field, yellow plywood splintering off in all directions, let her go, he thinks, less to catch fire, he thinks, because at that point he has plenty of time to think, five spinning seconds. “But she spun in and there I was, tail over teakettle in the field.”