The Way the Crow Flies

by Ann-Marie MacDonald

“Einstein is a Jew,” says Henry.

  Jack flinches at the word—it sounds abrupt, rude: Jew. It sounds … anti-Semitic. Jack knows that isn’t fair—just because Froelich is German doesn’t make him an anti-Semite.

  “Hitler rejects Jewish science”—Henry sounds more Teutonic than ever to Jack, clipped tones, confident to the point of arrogance—“also Hitler does not have the imagination to marry the rocket with the atomic warhead.”

  “Boy,” says Steve. “So in a strange way … Hitler’s anti-Semitism may have saved us from the big one.”

  Jack gives a low whistle. Henry says nothing.

  Elaine calls, “What are you boys talking about?”

  Jack smiles over at her. “Aw, fun ’n’ games, Elaine, fun ’n’ games.”

  “They’re talking politics,” says Mimi, carrying a TV table over with four plates of pineapple upside-down cake, “solving the world’s problems.” She sets the table down and winks at her husband.

  Vic protests, “That’s the third dessert tonight!”

  “I don’t know where you found the time, Mimi,” calls Betty.

  Jack notices Karen sitting a little apart, both babies asleep in her lap. Yet she doesn’t look maternal so much as … what? He tries to put his finger on it. She looks as though she’s on safari … like that woman who rescues animals … monkeys … lion cubs? What’s the name of that book?

  “Well stop being so boring,” Elaine calls to the men from her chaise, “and come talk to us.”

  “Let them get it out of their system, love,” says Betty, pouring tea, although Elaine is still working on a cocktail.

  Froelich takes a bite of cake. “Thank you Mrs. McCarthy—entschuldigen Sie mich, bitte—Mimi. Delicious cake.” He inclines his head in a formal old-world bow, and resumes energetically: “My point being, why go to the moon when we can so very well annihilate ourselves from here?”

  The other men look at him. “I’m talking about avoiding annihilation,” says Jack.

  “Then why don’t we get rid of the weapons?”

  “Are you a ban-the-bomb type, Henry?”

  “Sure, why not?”

  “So am I,” says Vic. “I’d like the Soviets to ban it first, though.”

  “The military are the biggest peaceniks of all,” says Jack. “Unlike a lot of politicians, military types know what war is like.”

  Henry Froelich says, “And some civilians too. They know.”

  Hal looks Henry in the eye. “That’s for sure, Henry. Lest we forget, eh?” He raises his glass.

  “To friendship,” Jack says.

  “To friendship,” the others join in.

  Over by the barbecue, the kids are roasting marshmallows. Mike has made a torch of his, claiming to prefer it well done, à point. Madeleine approaches Elizabeth. “Would you like a roasted marshmallow?”

  Elizabeth nods and sighs. Madeleine blows on the marshmallow, then holds the skewer out to her. Lisa and Auriel join her and watch as Elizabeth slowly savours the toasty white, her eyes half closed, a creamy moustache forming on her lip.

  “Is it good?” Auriel asks.

  “Yahhh.” Elizabeth’s head rests almost on one shoulder, then moves slowly in a half-circle and tilts back. Madeleine follows with the marshmallow. Elizabeth makes it look delicious.

  Lisa says, “Know what, Elizabeth? If you take a marshmallow and squish it, it shrinks and you get ghost gum. Want to try it?”

  “Yahhh.”

  Betty Boucher settles into a lawn chair and cuddles one of the Froelich babies. “With luck we’ll get a family moving into that little green bungalow down the street, with a daughter over twelve.”

  “Wouldn’t that be grand,” says Elaine Ridelle. Most children in the PMQs are no older than Mike, hence babysitters are at a premium. Vimy’s daughter Marsha is not able to babysit for the Bouchers Saturday night; the Woodleys are going away for the weekend.

  Karen Froelich says, “Ricky can babysit.” Perhaps she misinterprets the awkward silence that follows her offer as confusion because she adds, “My son.”

  Vimy turns to Mimi. “Ricky is a good friend of my daughter’s, he’s a lovely boy.”

  “He’s a doll,” adds Elaine.

  Karen nods vaguely. The other women smile and change the subject.

  Mimi has not yet met Ricky Froelich. She has no way of knowing what Betty and Elaine will tell her later: that Ricky is a good-looking youngster of fifteen, so responsible and well adjusted that many women in the PMQs wonder how he could possibly be a product of the Froelich household—not that the Froelichs aren’t good people, they are just … far from average. But the fact that Ricky is a fine boy is not the point. The point is, boys do not babysit. What kind of mother would volunteer her son for a girl’s job?

  Vic crosses the lawn, heading for the street, and says over his shoulder to the women, “I’m not sure but I think he’s just got the two dependents.”

  Betty asks, “Who?”

  Vic stops and turns. “The American moving into the bungalow. They’ve just got the one child.”

  “Vic, you never tell me anything!”

  “You never ask!”

  “He’s the new exchange officer,” says Hal, joining the women. “A flying instructor.”

  “We’ll have to have them over, Jack,” says Mimi. “They’ll be a long way from home.”

  “Aren’t we all,” adds Betty Boucher.

  Vic was on his way home to fetch his accordion, but Mimi stops him: “Stay right where you are!” She turns to her daughter and orders, “Madeleine, va chercher ton accordéon.” Her daughter groans but Mimi overrides her. “C’est pour monsieur Boucher, va vite, va vite.”

  Madeleine returns with her big red, white and black beast. Vic seats himself in a lawn chair, settles it onto his broad lap, undoes the snaps to let it inhale, then proceeds to bounce and hug the music out of it, elbows working the bellows, stocky fingers flying up and down the keys. Before long he has the children singing with him, then the women join in and so does Steve Ridelle. The young couple next door come out and join the crowd with their infant.

  Madeleine sings “Alouette” with the others, and wonders where Colleen Froelich is. Did she do something bad and have to stay home? Is she spying on us right now?

  Vic strikes up a jig, and Mimi sings, “‘Swing la bottine dans l’fond d’la bôite à bois.’” Mike dashes behind the house and returns with the baseball bat. He holds it end to end and jumps over it back and forth in double time to the music, like a wild boy, throwing it up, catching it, step-dancing. Mimi whoops, everyone claps time. Madeleine is painfully proud. She watched her boy cousins and one of her big huge uncles do the same dance this summer while Tante Yvonne played accordion—except in Acadie they used an axe handle, not a bat.

  Across the lawn, Jack and Henry join in the applause. Then Henry fills his pipe, tamps it down, tops it up, tamps it down. Jack takes out a pack of White Owl cigars and lights up. “You know, Henry, there is nothing I’d like better than to get rid of these things altogether. All the nukes. Hell of a thing to leave our kids. But we can’t stick our heads in the sand. What about the missile gap?”

  “If you believe in this gap.” Froelich finally strikes a match, stroking the open bowl of his pipe with the flame, puffing it to life.

  “Can we afford not to believe it?”

  “Even their Secretary of Defense does not believe it.”

  “Yeah, McNamara backtracked pretty quick on that one, eh? Still, you never know what they’ve got in the pipeline.” Jack spits out a speck of tobacco. “What’s that you’re smoking, Hank? Smells familiar.” More acrid than Amphora, a Continental edge to it—dark, as opposed to milk, chocolate.

  “Von Eicken. Deutsch tobacco.”

  “That explains it.”

  “Eisenhower warned his country it could be very dangerous to make a war economy during peacetime.”

  “Are we living in peacetime?” asks Jack, aiming a stream of smoke up into the deepen
ing blue of twilight.

  “Right here? Right now? Oh yes.”

  Jack nods a little, in time with the music—If you’re happy and you know it clap your hands, if you’re happy and you know it clap your hands, if you’re happy and you know it and you really want to show it….

  “Friede,” says Froelich.

  Jack looks at him sharply, then recalls. Of course. Peace. “You know, Henry, we can ban the bomb and do all that good stuff but we can’t stop mankind exploring.”

  “You want very badly to go to the moon, my friend.” The stem of Froelich’s pipe is moist; his face has filled out with conversation, shadows turned to creases.

  “Come on, Henry, you’re a scientist—”

  “I was.”

  “How can you not be excited about it? Pure research—”

  “There is no such thing. Some questions receive funds, others do not. Who is rich enough to ask the questions?”

  “Yeah but just imagine how it’ll change our point of view if we do get there.”

  “The world will still be a dangerous place, perhaps more so if—”

  “That’s where you’re wrong,” says Jack, his cigar unfurling slowly. “Think how our petty wars are going to look from nearly three hundred thousand miles up. Think how we’re going to feel flying through the dark. Can you imagine? Dead silence. And way down there behind us, there’s the earth. A beautiful blue speck, lit up like a sapphire. We won’t give a damn then who’s a Russian or who’s a Yank or whether you’re red, white, black or green. We might finally figure out that we’re all just people and we’ve all just got one shot at it, you know? This little life.” He glances over at the others, gathered round the music. Mimi has her eyes closed, singing with Vic. “‘Un Acadien errant—a wandering Acadian—banni de son pays—banished from his country….’” The mournful minor key of folk songs the world over.

  Henry Froelich says, “This is a beautiful idea.”

  Jack looks at him. The man looks sad all of a sudden, and Jack wonders what he has seen in his time. In his war. He is of an age to have seen a great deal. Past fifty, easily. Old enough to remember the first one—The Great War. Men who fought tend not to talk about it, but they readily acknowledge that they are veterans, even to a former enemy. Indeed, by now a fellow feeling exists among pilots who once strove to shoot each other out of the sky. But Jack cannot picture Froelich in uniform. He was more likely part of the war effort at an industrial level. Jack can easily see him on a factory floor: white shirt and clipboard, peering into the guts of a jet engine. Is he atoning for something? Maybe Centralia is a form of self-exile.

  Froelich continues, his voice soft and dark like the black of his beard. “This rocket of yours, Jack, it can do all this perhaps. This is very noble. Very beautiful. Like a poem. But it does not come from a beautiful place, it comes from….” He appears to have lost his train of thought. He glances about, takes a breath, raises his eyebrows briefly and recovers it. “You think it will take us up to heaven, ja? But it does not come from there.” He taps his pipe. “Also it is very expensive. Unfortunately only war is rich enough to pay for such a beautiful poem.”

  Froelich pours himself more wine.

  “Has it ever occurred to you, Jack, this? That Apollo is named for the sun? And yet the project is aimed at his sister, Artemis, the moon?”

  Froelich looks at him, waiting for an answer.

  “You got me there, Henry.”

  “Once upon a time there was a mountain cave. And inside the cave was a treasure.” There is a glint in Froelich’s eye. Jack waits. Is it possible his neighbour is a little drunk? “You see Jack, it is a fact that only the bowels of the earth can provide us with the means to propel ourselves toward the sun. Someone has to forge the arrows of Apollo. Even as someone had to build the pyramids. Slaves, yes? Which one of God’s angels is rich enough, do you think, to pay for our dream to fly so high we may glimpse perhaps the face of God?”

  Across the lawn, Vic and Mimi sing the second verse: “‘Un Canadien errant’” … a wandering Canadian … if you see my country, my unhappy country, go and tell my friends that I remember them….

  “Tell me something, Henry. What are you doing here?”

  “Oh well, after the war I met my wife in Germany, she volunteered at the U.N. camp where I—”

  “No, I mean how come you’re not teaching at a university somewhere?”

  Jack fears he has been rude to his guest—he has known the man less than twenty-four hours and now he’s grilling him. But Jack is used to getting to know people quickly. Because you do only get one life, and if someone can give you a tour of a road not taken, why would you not seize the chance? “I’m sorry, Henry, it’s none of my business.”

  “No, it is a very good question, and I have a very good answer.” Froelich smiles and the hard glint leaves his eye. He reminds Jack of pictures he has seen in National Geographic of emaciated holy men. Serene, starved. He answers: “I have everything I want right here.”

  Jack follows Froelich’s gaze over to Karen, picking up the babies in the grass. To his daughter in her wheelchair.

  “Cheers,” says Jack.

  “Prost.”

  They drink.

  The singsong has changed tempo again. Betty is warbling in a Cockney accent to her husband’s accordion accompaniment, “‘Will you love me when I’m mutton as you do now I am lamb?!’” Laughter, applause. And a lull—the children are gone. A few minutes ago, as though at some signal inaudible to the adult ear, they ran off, pelting down the street in the direction of the school. The lawn is suddenly peaceful and the women draw a collective sigh of relief. “Silence is golden,” says Elaine. Betty’s younger two are in the McCarthys’ house, asleep on the couch.

  Karen Froelich, having taken her babies home, has returned for Elizabeth. “Thanks, Mimi, it was a really nice get-together.”

  “Oh Karen, you’re not leaving already.”

  “Yeah, come on over any time.” She turns, saying to her husband, “Have fun, Hank.”

  Jack watches Froelich kiss his wife and say something in her ear as he lightly holds her hand. Again there is a certain quality in her expression, not precisely sad but as though she were smiling at something in the distance, or perhaps the past. She touches her husband’s chest briefly. Jack watches her walk away, pushing the wheelchair over the grass. She is pretty when she smiles.

  “Jack.”

  “What’s that, Hank?”

  “You make a nice party. Thank you.”

  Vic gets out from under the accordion, stretches his legs and reaches into his burlap sack.

  “I’ll put the kettle on,” says Betty.

  Elaine hands her cocktail glass to her husband. “Just a teeny one.”

  Vimy and Hal Woodley say their good nights—they’re expecting a long-distance call from their daughter at university, and in any case it wouldn’t do for them to be the last to leave. With their departure a further slight relaxation sets in.

  Vic upends his burlap bag onto the grass with a clatter. Jack asks Henry if Vic Boucher always travels with his own game of horseshoes, and Froelich replies, “I don’t know. This is my first time to have a social occasion with him. And Dr. Ridelle too—Steve.”

  Froelich has lived in the PMQs longer than any of them, yet he has socialized so little. Perhaps this is the first time anyone has asked him about his real subject of “how things go.” Jack senses that Froelich is a conversational treasure trove. You can almost feel the congenial heat of a fireplace when the man warms to his subject. And the sparks of impatience when he’s going full tilt. Typical German, thinks Jack. Now that he knows how much Henry likes to talk, he will pick another argument at the first opportunity. He watches Vic drive the metal post into the lawn with his foot and reflects that it just goes to show you’ll never find out anything if you don’t ask—Vic comes up to them, gold and silver horseshoes in hand, “Gentlemen, faites vos jeux”—you could be living next door to an Einstein or a Pica
sso and never know it. It’s important to know your neighbours. In the air force especially, because, in the absence of family and old friends, neighbours are what you have.

  Froelich takes a horseshoe and raises it to eye level, taking aim. A burst of laughter from the women reaches them, the steel horseshoe glints in Henry’s hand, sterling in the late summer sun like the wing of an aircraft, and Jack is suffused with happiness. Pure and untethered by any good reason, happiness born of this warm evening, the proximity of friends—brand-new yet so deeply familiar—the smell of grass and tobacco, the dying coals of the barbecue, the deep blue dome above, sunlight on silver in his neighbour’s hand. He blinks into the big sun over the horizon because tears have come to his eyes and, to his mind, the words of a poem he learned years ago.

  Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth

  And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;

  Sunward I’ve climbed and joined the tumbling mirth

  Of sun-split clouds—done a hundred things

  You have not dreamed of—-wheeled and soared and swung

  High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there

  I’ve chased the shouting wind along and flung

  My eager craft through footless halls of air.

  Up, up the long delirious, burning blue

  I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace,

  Where never lark, or even eagle, flew;

  And, while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod

  The high untrespassed sanctity of space,

  Put out my hand and touched the face of God.

  The young air force pilot who wrote the poem also had an accident while training, and never got to go operational. He was killed. Jack watches the horseshoe leave his neighbour’s hand.

  PIED PIPERS

  QUICK, EVERYONE RUN to the schoolyard, there’s a guy down there with a motor scooter and he’s giving people rides!

  This was the information picked up by kid radar that drew Madeleine and the others from the barbecue and the singsong, and sent them tearing down the street like wildlife from a burning forest. Before they could see it they heard the engine, revving like a souped-up lawn-mower. They cut through between the houses at the bottom of the street and into the freshly mown field toward the school, where a crowd had gathered. There must have been at least fifty kids of all ages, on bikes, trikes, wagons and on foot—and beyond them, zipping past, his head and shoulders visible above the throng, a dark-haired boy. A teenager.