The Way the Crow Flies

by Ann-Marie MacDonald

  Jack has heard that intelligence work can be numbingly dull, but he can’t picture Simon bored. He does his best to suppress a tingle of anticipation. The favour will likely be just that. Dull. In any case, it’ll be an excuse to hoist a few beers with Simon. Pry some Cold War stories out of him.

  Jack tried once or twice after the war to track him down, but Simon had demobbed without a forwarding address. Then last summer, in a medieval town in northern Germany, he ran into him. Jack was with Madeleine, about to take her picture in front of the statue of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. The McCarthys were on holiday, making the most of their last summer in Europe, driving the Fairytale Route—the Märchen Strasse. They had visited the castle in the Reinhard Forest where the Brothers Grimm had stayed; they had toured Bremen, where the animal musicians fooled the robbers. Now they were in Hameln, the Hamelin of legend. Mimi had gone off with Mike for the afternoon. Tomorrow they would trade and Mike would spend the morning with his father for a little one-on-one time.

  Jack was focusing his Voigtlander slide camera on Madeleine, who smiled, squinting into the sun, the stone Piper towering behind her. Tourists milled about, passing in and out of frame behind the statue. Jack was ready to snap the picture when he saw a man pause to light a cigarette. Son of a gun.

  “Simon!” he called, lowering the camera.

  The man looked around and a smile broke over his face. “Jack?” he said, rounding the statue, coming toward him. “You still at large?”

  Eighteen years can work a lot of changes in a man but Simon was unmistakeable. Not just his trim build but his voice, the way he carried himself—his whole manner seemed to say, the most natural thing in the world, running into you, mate. They smacked their palms together and shook hands, laughing. Reflex is a reliable indicator. Jack’s reflex—and it seemed Simon’s too—was pure delight; as though they were laughing at the punchline of a joke they’d left off telling in 1943.

  “You sorry bastard,” said Simon; then, glancing down, caught himself. “I beg your pardon, who is this young lady then?”

  “This is our Deutsches Mädchen,” said Jack.

  “Well how do you do, Fräulein? Sprechen Sie Deutsch?”

  Madeleine replied, “Ein Bisschen.”

  Simon laughed.

  Jack said, “Madeleine, this is Squadron Leader Crawford.”

  “Jack, for Christ sake, I’m retired.” Then, looking down at her, he said, “Madeleine, please call me Simon.”

  She hesitated, squinting up at him.

  We should all age like Simon. Light blue eyes, shrewd behind the smile. The healthy smoker’s skin, fine lines in a light leather tan that can look good on a man in 1961. Touch of steel through his honey-brown hair, combed quickly but neatly back. In his early forties and unlikely to change till he hits sixty-five. Camel cigarette cooking between his fingers.

  He smiled down at Madeleine and said, “All right then, how about ‘Uncle Simon’?”

  “Uncle Simon,” she said. And both men chuckled.

  “What are your plans for the future, Madeleine?”

  She replied without hesitation, “I’m going to be either a comedian or a spy.”

  Simon threw his head back and laughed. Jack beamed. “That’s the stuff, old buddy.”

  Simon volunteered that he was a diplomat now.

  “You’re kidding,” said Jack. “You’re the most undiplomatic sonofabi—gun I know.”

  “That’s First Secretary Crawford to you, mate.”

  “What the heck are you doing here?”

  “As a matter of fact I’m on holiday. Meeting a friend.”

  Say no more. Jack was not about to pry.

  Simon was actually based in Berlin now, having just been posted from the British Embassy in Moscow.

  “What’s Moscow like?”

  “Cold.”

  He was on temporary duty at Military Headquarters in Berlin, working on Allied records indexes—a vast collection of German dossiers, both military and civilian.

  Jack said, “How’s your German?”

  “Better than my Russian.” Next year he would be in Washington. “I’m brushing up on my American.”

  Simon was the same. The self-mocking manner, affecting by turns Cockney and upper-class terms of endearment and scorn. He hadn’t married. Jack showed him a picture of Mimi and he said, “What’s a goddess like that doing with a poor slob like you?”

  “Somebody up there likes me,” said Jack.

  “Well, we knew that.”

  The three of them went to a Biergarten. Madeleine had a sip from each man’s glass, and made them laugh with her white foam moustache. The waitress brought stein after stein for den Herren and pommes frites and limonade für das Mädchen. It was a glorious afternoon.

  The following April, Simon called and asked for the “favour.” Jack listened carefully. He knew how to interpret the casual request. One of Simon’s suggestions. Could almost feel him in the instructor’s seat beside him….

  Jack steps from the sidewalk onto the blacktop of the parade square and the heat hits him. He heads diagonally toward the PX and the phone booth. He would not be surprised if Simon was MI6. British Secret Intelligence Service. MI6 agents don’t advertise themselves; at one time not even their wives could know. Not a problem in Simon’s case.

  Jack feels for dimes in his pocket and experiences a twinge of excitement. A scientist is coming from the Soviet Union. A defector. The man needs a safe place to live for six months or so before moving on. “Make him feel at home,” said Simon. “Poor bastard’s bound to be a little on edge, a little culture-shocked. Cook him up some of that wonderful slop, what’s that macaroni dish called?”

  “Kraft Dinner.”

  “That’s the one.”

  Another scientist has come over to our side; that’s all Jack knows at this point. Simon was explicit in his way—“You might want to keep it to yourself”—the official term is need-to-know but Simon was never big on official terms. It might be fun to tell Mimi but she doesn’t need to know, and in any case, Jack is not in the habit of bringing his work home. Hal Woodley doesn’t need to know either. Simon pointed out that Jack will be acting as a private citizen, briefly playing host to the friend of a friend, strictly unofficial.

  Back in 4 Wing, Jack and all other personnel had “war tasks” they would be called upon to perform in the event of an attack from the Eastern Sector. Jack’s war task assignment was Intelligence. It required a top secret security clearance and involved debriefing pilots returning from exercise missions and reporting the results to the station commander and Air Division HQ. He is not unfamiliar with need-to-know. It occurs to him now to wonder whether Simon could have known that.

  He reaches into his pocket and counts out the dimes. A Soviet scientist. Simon has referred to him only as “our friend from the East.” Jack pictures a square-headed man with slicked black hair, thick black-rimmed glasses and a lab coat. What kind of science? Nuclear? “Rather an important chap,” said Simon. Our friend. Why is Canada getting him?

  Jack is about to open the folding glass door of the phone booth when someone says, “Wing Commander McCarthy?” He turns. A fat man sticks out his hand.

  “I’m Vic Boucher, sir.”

  Jack shakes the hand. “Good to meet you, Vic.”

  Squadron Leader Vic Boucher. Built like a medicine ball, every bit as solid and almost as bald. “Welcome back to the land of round doorknobs, sir.”

  “And speed limits,” adds Jack.

  A friend of his back in 4 Wing is an old buddy of Vic Boucher’s. They flew together in the war. Boucher was a tail gunner. Picture him now, squashed into the glass turret at the butt-end of a Lanc, and you want to grin. But he would have been trimmer then—the fear alone. A bomber crew’s average life expectancy was six weeks; the tail gunner’s, considerably shorter.

  “I’ve been warned about you, Boucher.”

  “I’ll bet you have,” says Vic. “It’s all lies. You coming to the mess, s
ir?” He straightens his tie. “Go ahead, make your call, I’ll wait.” His French accent sounds homey to Jack.

  “Naw, macht nichts, let’s walk.” Jack pronounces it “mox nix,” meaning “makes no difference” or, in air force parlance, “I’m easy.” Like most veterans of German postings, he has mastered only a few choice survival phrases: danke schön, einmal Bier bitte and auf Wiedersehen.

  “Righto,” says Vic.

  “Oui, d’accord,” says Jack, and Vic laughs.

  Jack likes the man immediately. One of his senior officers, in charge of training standards at the COS. And, most important, president of the mess committee. “I’m not going to let you rope me into any committees, Vic.”

  Vic laughs again. “We got an opening for treasurer.”

  “I’ll keep you posted.”

  Jack invites him and his wife over for supper tomorrow night. Mimi will be happy to have someone to rattle away with in French. He walks with Vic, retracing his steps across the parade square. Simon will have to wait till after lunch. Pay phones may be secure but they are far from soundproof.

  THE MAYFLOWER

  Americans like what they have and want more of the same.

  “How America Feels” Gallup survey, Look, January 5, 1960

  MADELEINE IS IN the driveway, leaning against the bumper of the Rambler, staring across the street at the messy purple house. Glinting at the foot of its front porch is something that was not there before. A wheelchair.

  It is the only fully assembled rust-free object on the property, and it was suddenly there this morning when the McCarthys drove in from their motel. Abracadabra!

  Madeleine is waiting for the moving van. She waited all morning and it looks as though she will have to wait all afternoon. She and Mike and Maman just ate lunch. Swanson TV dinners, minus the TV. Everything in its own little compartment like on an airplane. But lunch is over now, it’s hot and there’s nothing to do. Mike has gone off somewhere with another boy—no fair, he has a friend already. She looks down at her favourite plaid shorts with the fringed pocket, at her tanned legs, knees free of scabs because it has been so long since she had any fun. Her slip-on red runners bear the only signs of wear and tear. Her mother has tried to throw them out but they are just getting good, both big toes having worked their way through the canvas. The process can be hastened by dragging your toes as you coast downhill on your bike. But my bike is on the moving van and the moving van will never get here.

  Madeleine’s bike has fat tires—there is no such thing in Canada. Her bike looks like a little blue motorcycle, with an aerodynamic swell in the sloping crossbar that sports swift white letters, Zippy Vélo. It doesn’t look like a girl’s bike, nor does it look like the faux pas of a boy’s bike, it’s European. A Volks Bike.

  The sun winks down on the road. Across the street and a few doors to the left, at the tan house on the corner, the mother of the Hula Hoop girl is unloading groceries from the orange VW van, but the girl is nowhere to be seen.

  The neighbours who live in the other half of the McCarthys’ white duplex are a dead loss. Maman calls them a “lovely young couple.” They have a screeching infant at which they spend all their time gazing. The wife looks puffy and damp—Madeleine’s mother has told her she is beautiful. Madeleine plans never to have babies, never to marry. She intends to live with her brother and never become doughy and moist.

  The intimate weight of sun has muted the entire PMQs. As though everyone in the kingdom had fallen asleep. Madeleine feels the heat on her head like a hand. She stares across at the wheelchair. Light splinters from its steel frame.

  At first sight it made her feel a bit queasy, the way things like that can. Crutches and leg braces. Strange twisty people in wheelchairs—you feel guilty and grateful not to be them or to be in an iron lung. Say a little prayer for them, says her mother, and don’t stare. But Madeleine is staring now because the wheelchair is empty, there is no one around to get their feelings hurt.

  “Where’s Mike?” asked her father when he left this morning. Even then Madeleine was already wearying of her moving-van vigil.

  “He made a friend and they took off.”

  “Why don’t you go find some pals?”

  “There isn’t anyone.”

  He laughed his gentle incredulous laugh. “The PMQs are crawling with kids, old buddy.”

  Dad is so innocent. He thinks you can just go up to a group of kids and say, “Hey you guys, can I play too?” He talks of impromptu games of shinny back in the hometown streets, gangs of buddies roaming the New Brunswick woods, fishing, jigging from school, terrorizing the nuns, having a great time growing up together. Madeleine doesn’t know a soul here, and how are you supposed to get to know anyone when school doesn’t even start for a week? Mike always makes friends right off the bat. Boys don’t care so much if you are new. Girls look at you like you’re some kind of bug until they decide whether or not they want to play with your hair.

  Madeleine despairs of the moving van and begins to leave the driveway. Taking baby steps, one foot in front of the other, heel to toe, because it will take longer to cross the street that way and the moving van will come sooner.

  Nancy Drew and the Case of the Mysterious Wheelchair. Maybe they have a crippled mother. Imagine if your mother were crippled. “Come here, dear, so I can dress you.” You would always have to obey her and answer nicely because how cruel to talk back to a crippled mother or to run away out of her reach. Imagine her making your sandwiches with her weak hands, wheeling over to the fridge for the mayonnaise. It makes Madeleine appreciate her own mother. It’s good to appreciate your mother. She imagines her mother dead in order to appreciate her better: imagine if it were just me and Mike and Dad. Eating fried chicken every night and going to air shows. I’d wear Mike’s hand-me-downs and people would think I was a boy. She reminds herself that the prerequisite for this all-boy Shangri-La is the death of her mother, and cuts the fantasy short. It’s just not worth it if your mother has to die.

  She breaks and runs in a heartburst of speed that takes her halfway down St. Lawrence Avenue in the direction of the school before she stops to catch her breath. On her left stands an empty green bungalow. She walks up to it and peeks in the living-room window.

  Polished wood floors, fresh white walls. After the new people move in, she will remember spying on their empty house. She flops onto her back on the bungalow’s overgrown front lawn and moves her arms and legs as though she were making a snow angel in the grass. Are there other worlds? Is it possible to sail to a place where there are towns under water, and talking animals? Sometimes Madeleine believes so fervently that she gets tears in her eyes. She stares up at the clouds. A mountain. A camel. Milton Berle—Good evening, ladies and germs. The mountain moves—a door opens up like a mouth. What was inside the Pied Piper’s mountain? Was it like Aladdin’s cave, full of treasure? The mountain flattens and drifts apart to reveal the moon. It looks like a Communion host way up there, flavourless. Madeleine would rather go to sea than to the moon, would rather travel to the olden days than to the future. She would sneak up on Hitler at the Eagle’s Nest and push him over an Alp like the wheelchair in Heidi, and she would warn Anne Frank not to stay in Holland. She plucks grass with both hands and sprinkles it over herself. If she stays here long enough she will be totally buried and no one will find her. Think how worried they all will be when she doesn’t come home. Mike will be terribly sorry, and pray to God to bring his little sister back. Imagine the rejoicing when they find she isn’t dead after all. And none of it will be her fault, because she just lay down in the grass quite innocently … and closed her eyes … in the valley of the jolly, ho ho ho, green giant.

  On the back porch Mimi finishes a letter to her sister Yvonne, and starts one to Domithilde. Mimi holds nothing back from Yvonne, but Domithilde entered the convent years ago and can’t be expected to appreciate the minutiae of family life. Chère Domithilde, on est enfin arrivé à Centralia….

  When she
finishes the letter to Domithilde, she starts one to their German friends. Liebe Hans und Brigitte, Finally we are here. Willkommen in Centralia!

  “Mrs. McCarthy?”

  She looks up. A slim woman, a little older than herself, in spectator pumps and crisp belted dress, tastefully dyed strawberry blonde hair.

  “I’m Vimy Woodley, welcome to Centralia.”

  Mimi gets up, reflexively touches her hair with one hand and extends the other. “Mrs. Woodley, it’s so nice to meet you, please call me Mimi.”

  The CO’s wife, and me in my ugly old shorts!

  “Call me Vimy, dear.” She’s holding a plate covered in tinfoil. “Now it’s not much, but you’re to serve them warm.”

  Piggies in a blanket. “Oh, mais c’est trop gentil.”

  Vimy smiles and Mimi blushes at having addressed her in French.

  “You’re in good company, Mimi, you’ve got a French Canadian neighbour just up the street. Have you met the Bouchers?”

  “Not yet.”

  “We’ll have you over once you’ve settled in. Now a lot of people are away, and the Wives’ Club won’t be up to speed for a few weeks, but I’ll pop a package in your mailbox to help you get your bearings. Just bits and pieces about the station and the area and the school and what-not.”

  “Thank you so much—Vimy?”

  “That’s right, dear.”

  “You’re French?”

  “I was named for an uncle who fought at Vimy Ridge. I’m just grateful they didn’t call me Passchendaele.”

  “Or Big Bertha,” quips Mimi and turns beet-red because nothing could be less apt, and it’s too soon to joke so familiarly, but Vimy Woodley laughs.

  “Vimy, will you come in for a cup of—for a glass of—?”

  “Mimi, I wouldn’t dream of it.”