The Way the Crow Flies

by Ann-Marie MacDonald

  “Sir, would you care to join my family this Sunday for—?”

  Fried is already shaking his head, but Jack continues, “My wife’s a great cook and she speaks pretty good German, besser denn mein, eh? In fact we’ve got a German neighbour, a science type like yourself—”

  Fried says, still shaking his head, “I do not do this—”

  “It’s entirely up to you, sir, I just want you to know you’re welcome and it’s fine with Mr. Crawford—Simon.”

  “Ja, Si-mon,” says Fried, as though it were two words.

  “Now, you know what to say if anyone asks why you’re here?” Jack puts his hat back on and adjusts it.

  “Guest professor of Western University, London.”

  “That’s right.”

  Jack takes a last look around. There is nothing more for him to do. The fridge is stocked, there is toilet paper in the bathroom, and on the small dining table is a map of London. Simon has seen to everything. Except for a TV. As an afterthought, Jack goes to the map and circles Storybook Gardens.

  “Orchids,” he says, eliciting a faint smile from Fried. “Auf Wiedersehen for now, sir.”

  “Goodbye,” says Fried.

  The door closes behind him and Jack hears the slide and schunk of locks, followed by silence. He can feel Fried looking at him through the peephole, waiting for him to leave. He turns back the way he came, down the silent swirl of red and orange, and dismisses a mild sense of anticlimax. Well, what did he expect? A glass of schnapps and a chinwag about the space race? Give Fried a week or so, Jack thinks, and he’ll be thirsting for company. Jack will have him out to the house for supper, relaxed and nursing his pipe—that’s what the tobacco smell was, he realizes now, Fried and Froelich smoke the same brand. The two of them might very well hit it off—both Germans, both men of science displaced by war. Jack reaches the elevator and pauses at the recollection that Henry is Jewish. Well, what difference should that make to Oskar Fried? Jack has committed that error once already: assuming that Henry was an anti-Semite because he was German. He presses the button and waits. Fried is a scientist. He of all people is likely to be above that sort of thing—what does it matter if you’re black, green or blue when you’re splitting the atom? Maybe Jack can pour a few good Löwenbräus and get them talking politics—if not science. Introduce his kids to Fried, knowing that one day he can tell them they met a real live defector. A Soviet scientist, straight out of the history books.

  The elevator opens and he steps in. As the doors close, he hears a small dog yapping from somewhere in the building; otherwise he encounters no one on his way back to the car.

  Madeleine has built a tank and a station wagon. Claire has finished her house and built a church which they have agreed is also the school and the A&P. They are arranging farm animals around their new subdivision when the phone rings in the kitchen.

  “Hello? … Hi Sharon …,” says Mrs. Froelich. “Yeah, she is.” She laughs. “Well I wouldn’t mind if she did … no big deal … sure, I’ll send her home….”

  Madeleine watches out the Froelichs’ living-room window as Claire walks away down the driveway. Marsha Woodley is there at the foot of it, talking to Ricky. Claire reaches out and takes Ricky’s hand. Marsha takes Claire’s other hand and the three of them walk down St. Lawrence Avenue like that, toward the McCarrolls’ house, just as though Ricky and Marsha were her parents and Claire was their little girl.

  Jack drops off the staff car and returns to his office to find a message telling him to call the CO. He asks his admin clerk, “When did this come in?” Has he been missed? His clerk answers, “An hour ago, sir.” Jack dials the CO’s extension—what will he say if Woodley asks where he has been? Jack doesn’t relish the thought of lying to his commanding officer.

  He needn’t have worried. Woodley was calling to advise him that the prime minister has finally ordered an increase in the alert status. The Canadian armed forces are at “military vigilance”—a level just short of the U.S. defcon 2. But Diefenbaker still has not made a statement in support of the U.S. And the alert is to be implemented secretly. “You’ve got to be kidding,” says Jack.

  Our Voodoo interceptors “may or may not” now be armed with Genie nuclear missiles which we “may or may not” have in our possession.

  “Fun ’n’ games, eh?” says Hal.

  “Bunch of Mickey Mouse politicians.”

  “Let’s keep our eye on the ball, shall we? Old Dief needs all the help he can get.”

  Jack gets the message. There has been enough bellyaching about government in the past couple of days; the people of Canada elected Diefenbaker for better or worse, and that’s who the military is working for. The new state of alert will have little effect on the operations of RCAF Centralia. They are in for more high-tension thumb-twiddling; all the more reason to cool it with the complaints.

  “Righto,” says Jack.

  “’Wiedersehen.”

  Jack crosses the Huron County road and enters the PMQ patch. He feels tired for some reason. Kids are out playing. In the Boucher driveway, a team’s worth of hockey equipment is laid out to air, and up ahead, in Jack’s own driveway, the Rambler is parked awry, which is how he can tell Mimi’s been out shopping. Everything looks normal. But that’s just a veneer. Normal has begun to mean that we could all be annihilated in a matter of hours. He takes a big breath of autumn air. You never had it so good. Who said that? How can something be so true and so false at the same time?

  He sees his daughter come out of the Froelich house with the German shepherd dog. Jack would rather she didn’t get so close to that animal—they can turn on you. But she’s fearless, clutching its fur, her eyes squeezed shut as the dog “guides” her across the street. And he remembers what it was he was going to do today. Drop in on Mr. Marks.

  He watches her arrive at the front step and open her eyes. The dog lopes home; she turns and sees Jack and runs to him. He opens his arms, catches her and swings her around—“Dad, give me an aeroplane!”

  He takes her by an ankle and a wrist and spins. She’s fine. She has forgotten all about “duck and cover.” He won’t alarm her by bringing up the subject again, with its attendant spectre of annihilation.

  “Eat up, Mike,” says Jack. But the boy picks at his dinner. One-word answers to all Jack’s questions. “How was school?”

  “… Okay.”

  “Sit up straight, mister, and eat what your mother cooked for you.”

  He feels a degree of annoyance that he knows is out of proportion to the situation. He would like to blame it on the current world crisis but he knows it predates that. The boy is becoming sullen. Mimi says he has entered the “awkward age.” Jack replied, “In my day, we couldn’t afford an ‘awkward age,’ we were too busy putting food on the table.” And she came back with that French astringency: “You want him to have the things you never had, well this is one.” He was stung, but glad that his wife is able to best him so reliably in these matters. It gives him permission to be “a nice papa.” Because lately he has had the sense that he is flying blind when it comes to the boy. His own father never would have stood for these truculent one-syllable retorts. But then Jack wouldn’t wish his own father on anyone.

  Mimi says, “Qu’est-ce que tu as, Michel?”

  The boy looks up at his father. “Dad, are we on alert?”

  Jack stabs his mashed potatoes with his fork. “There’s nothing for you to worry about, Mike. The only ones who should be worried are those poor old crows, they must’ve got an awful fright when the siren went off today.” And he winks at Madeleine.

  “What if there’s a war, are we just gonna sit there?” asks Mike.

  Madeleine expects him to be told that there isn’t going to be a war, how many times do I have to—? But her father eats steadily, chewing, chewing his potatoes, his lips getting thinner. Is someone in trouble?

  “What does history tell you, Mike?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “‘Waddyam
ean?’”—imitating his son’s surly tone. “I mean, what did we do when war broke out in 1914?”

  “We fought.”

  “That’s right. And in 1939?”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “We were first in with the British both times and we fought and we died and we won.”

  “Yeah, but the Americans—”

  “The Americans were late into both wars.”

  “Yeah, but this time the Americans—”

  “The Americans are what stand between us and Communism.”

  Mimi murmurs, “Jack.”

  “We can’t even defend ourselves. Arnold’s dad says—”

  “I’m not interested in what Arnold’s dad—”

  “We’re too chicken to even go on alert!”

  Jack mashes homemade chow-chow into his potatoes and doesn’t reply. Mimi says, “Madeleine, have you decided what you want to be for Halloween?”

  Madeleine is surprised at the question. It has never occurred to her to abandon the sacred clown costume she has worn for the past two years. Halloween costumes are not to be traded in lightly, they are … like vestments. “A clown,” she answers.

  “Encore? Mais il est trop petit maintenant pour toi.”

  “Can’t you make it bigger?”

  Mimi shrugs. “Sure, but I thought maybe we could make you a new one. You could be a ballerina or a—”

  “I want to be a clown again.”

  “We’re cowards, that’s all,” says Mike.

  “I’ve got news for you, Mike….” Her father puts down his fork. Madeleine holds her breath—is Mike going to get it? But Dad sounds calm. “We are on alert.”

  “Jack—”

  “It’s true,” he says to Mimi. “You won’t see it in the papers but he’s got a right to know. We all do. As Canadians.”

  Madeleine’s face is hot. She waits. Dad says each word slowly. “An elevation in the alert status of the armed forces is a routine precaution”—as if he were explaining something that would be perfectly obvious to anyone but a silly ass. “It’s called crisis management and it’s only common sense. It sends a message to the Russians: ‘Listen, fellas’”—he points his fork at Mike—“‘we mean business, so hands off our buddies ’cause if you mess with them, you’re messin’ with us.’” He jabs his potatoes several times in quick succession. “This whole thing’ll blow over. Castro is a puppet and it’s only a matter of time before his own people see that.” Castro is a puppet. Madeleine tries not to laugh. “What bothers me,” Dad is saying, “is we’ve got these jokers up on Parliament Hill who are indulging in the lowest form of Canadian nationalism.” He pauses. Madeleine bites away the grin on the inside of her cheek. “Anti-Americanism.”

  The word hangs in the air, until finally Mimi says, “Can we have dessert now, ma grande foi D’jeu?”

  Jack laughs. “You should be running the Excomm, Missus.”

  After supper, Jack sends his daughter down to the basement to play with her brother so that she won’t hear his optimistic dinner-table dismissal of the crisis contradicted on the six o’clock news. He watches U Thant deliver his calm and desperate plea in the U.N. and wonders if he went too far over supper—will Madeleine have nightmares again? He listens for sounds of a squabble from the basement, but the kids are quiet down there. They’re getting all kinds of alarmist misinformation out there, at school and in the playground. They ought to hear some actual facts at home—not gloom and doom, but enough reality to inspire confidence in him.

  Aerial photographs appear on the screen, taken by U-2 spy planes: launching pads, somewhere in the hills of Cuba. He switches off the TV and tells Mimi he is stepping outside to stretch his legs.

  Over at the Froelichs,’ a living-room lamp stands in the driveway, lampshade and all. It casts a rosy glow on the exposed engine of the automotive heap. Froelich is in his apron and white shirt-sleeves, bent under the hood with his son. They work to the accompaniment of a tinny transistor radio. Jack saunters across.

  “Hank, how’re you making out there?”

  “Not too shabby, Jack.”

  Ricky looks up and greets him, and Jack says, “I’ve seen you out there running with your sister, Rick, how far do you go normally?”

  “Till one of us gets tired, I guess. Seven or eight miles.”

  “Good stuff.”

  Froelich fills his pipe with his grease-stained fingers, Jack takes out a Tiparillo.

  “Forget the car, Henry, why don’t you build a great big bomb out here instead, and aim it straight at Ottawa?”

  Froelich puffs his pipe to life. “You are angry, Jack.”

  Jack is surprised. “Naw, I’m not angry, I’m just frustrated with how our fearless leader is handling things. Or not handling them as the case may be.” He puffs. “Yeah, you’re right, I’m angry.”

  The boy disappears under the car and Jack lowers his voice. “How do you figure the chances we’ll all be blown sky-high this time next week?”

  He is surprised at his own question—at how he has phrased it. He wouldn’t express himself this way at work. Like his fellow officers, he is not given to alarmist language—they are not Americans. Not yet, anyway. But he has blurted the question to Froelich, perhaps because he senses that Froelich is not easily alarmed.

  Henry says, “Will you pass me the wrench? The middle one, ja. Danke,” and bends to the engine. “Jack. My first opinion is, this crisis is predictable.”

  Jack nods. “Bay of Pigs.”

  “Also the Americans still have their base in Cuba.”

  “At Guantánamo, yeah.”

  “And also America has already many missiles on the Soviet doorstep.”

  “Turkey. But those’re obsolete. And the Yanks didn’t put them there in secret.”

  “I don’t know how comfortable this is to people in the target.”

  “True. But I trust the Americans not to use them.”

  “The Americans have used them already.”

  “Right.” Jack pulls on his cigar. “But that was to end a war, not to start one. I don’t trust the Soviets as far as I can spit.”

  “I do not trust either,” says Froelich, and Jack finds it difficult to tell, knowing the syntactical idiosyncrasies of Froelich’s English, whether he means I don’t trust the Soviets either, or I don’t trust either of them. Such are the hazards of translation. Imagine trying to analyze the latest missive from Khrushchev. We’ll all go up in a mushroom cloud because of a preposition. But Froelich is saying, “I think they play a dangerous game, the Americans and the Russians, and they play this together.”

  “Can I use the torch, Pop?” asks Rick.

  “What do you mean, Hank?”

  Froelich turns to his son. “Yes, no, find your safety glasses, then yes”—then turns back to Jack. “I agree with Eisenhower.”

  “You liked Ike?”

  “He warned of too much military industries. We force the Russians to keep up. People grow rich from these industries and they become to have political influence.”

  “It’s called the arms race,” says Jack.

  “I think it is what the British call, ‘silly bugger.’” He wipes carbon buildup from the old distributor cap.

  Jack laughs. “So you don’t think the world is going to end tomorrow?”

  “The world has ended many times, my friend.”

  Jack thinks of the numbers on Froelich’s arm, concealed by the white shirt. He would like to find a way to apologize for … having been a jackass. But referring to a subject that Froelich has not seen fit to broach might only distress the man … and compound Jack’s faux pas.

  Henry says, “Pass me the Robertson’s red.” Jack hands him the screwdriver. Overhead the stars are crisp and bright. Jack looks up at the moon, cold and calm. Look long enough and you may see a satellite. The Froelich boy’s transistor radio catches invisible signals from the air, as though netting schools of fish, and translates them into a male voice singing in a falsetto about the girl he loves�
��in Mecca.

  “The United States also acts in secret, for example U-2,” says Froelich.

  “How else are we supposed to know the Russians are arming Cuba to the teeth?”

  “What about Gary Powers when he has invaded Soviet air last May?”

  “We used to do that all the time in Germany,” says Jack and grins. Froelich glances up. Jack explains, “Our fellas’d climb into their Sabres and scream across into the Eastern Sector to test the Soviet response time. The Russkies’d send up their MiGs and chase us back home. They did the same thing to us.”

  “If this was so harmless,” says Froelich, “why did Eisenhower say it was a weather plane for NASA?” He relights his pipe.

  The aroma reminds Jack of home. Germany. He and Mimi and their little family—something complete about their lives over there. The sense that every day the world got a bit better. Cities healed, one brick, one spire at a time, flowers bloomed in window boxes. Perhaps it’s just nostalgia … for the smiles that greeted them when people found out they were Canadian. A new alliance forged from the intimacy of enmity. The past and the present had made a pact and the result was the future. Perhaps they were simply happy there. He is taken aback at that thought, because it would imply that he is something other than happy now. But, the current crisis notwithstanding, he is happy, surely. He is not aware of being unhappy. He taps the ash from his cigar and watches it float to the ground.

  “Bottom line is, Henry, Castro is a puppet and Kennedy is an elected leader.”

  “It’s a pity Americans are not so fond of democracy outside their own borders.” Sparks fly from the back of the car, where Rick is welding.

  “That’s not true, Henry, what about the Marshall Plan, look at”—Jack almost says Germany, but catches himself—“Western Europe, look at Japan.”

  “Look at Latin America, look at Indochina—”

  “Uncle Sam can’t solve the problems of the whole world—”

  “Part of the world just asks him to stay away—”

  “Would you rather live in the Soviet Union, Henry?”