The Way the Crow Flies

by Ann-Marie MacDonald

  Schwarzwald Flieger (Black Forest Flyer) magazine of RCAF 4

  Fighter Wing, West Germany, 1962

  IN THE PARK behind the Froelich house, the slide is only half as high because of the snow, and the swings are lodged in drifts. In backyards, small children skate, ankles collapsed inward, on postage-stamp rinks that their fathers have flooded. Claire McCarroll is among these, gingerly walking on her new blades toward her father’s outstretched hands—this is her first Canadian winter. In the McCarthys’ dining room, the heat from the Advent candles causes the brass angels to rotate on their wheel above, spinning a little faster every Sunday as one more flame is added. Madeleine and Mike take turns opening the tiny cardboard doors on the dog-eared December calendar that Mimi has stuck to the fridge for the fifth year in a row. The chocolates that came with it, hiding behind each day of the month, are long gone, but the tiny pictures remain: a dog, a candle, a Christmas tree…. All leading up to the twenty-fourth, when the Baby Jesus will be revealed. Across the top, in medieval script, are the words “Fröhliche Weihnachten.” Merry Christmas, from the land of “O Tannenbaum.” Mimi has tried to replace the calendar with a new one but the children will not hear of it.

  Jack goes to the parent-teacher interviews with Mimi and feels lighter than he has in months. Mike is doing satisfactorily but is capable of more. “He needs to apply himself,” says Miss Crane. She is concerned that he is spending more time with Arnold Pinder than is perhaps advisable. But she likes Mike. She’s not supposed to have favourites, but he is definitely one. A nice boy. A good-hearted boy. Jack glances at Mimi. She’s beaming.

  Madeleine may have got off on the wrong foot but she has come up from behind to excel—her report card was worth framing. Jack looks from the officious felt animals on the bulletin board to the bland teacher sitting before him. A limp grey man with watery eyes—a walrus moustache would not be amiss. He is the type who gets picked on in the schoolyard, then grows up to take his revenge in the classroom. Somehow Jack’s daughter is managing to learn from this clown. It only makes Jack more proud of her.

  By the second week, Christmas cards have accumulated on strings hung between living room and dining room, and the stockings go up over the fireplace, their names embroidered by Mimi years ago in Alberta: Papa, Maman, Michel, Madeleine. On the mantelpiece the nativity scene is set out, nestled in cotton-wool snow. Bought in Germany in ’58, it is a tableau that Madeleine never tires of contemplating. An angel watches over the wooden stable, its floor strewn with straw; in and about it, painted ceramic cattle and sheep sleep and graze while Joseph and Mary kneel at either end of the empty manger—the Baby Jesus is hiding in the drawer of Maman’s sewing table until Christmas Day. Shepherds hover outside the stable, and Madeleine changes their positions daily, along with the animals. She is sorely tempted to add an army man or two of Mike’s to the scene. The Three Wise Men make their way on camel-back from the far end of the mantelpiece, but Madeleine improvises, making them cover vast distances across the dining-room table, the desert of the kitchen floor; stranding them on top of the fridge, the North Pole—musta taken a wrong turn at Albuquerque. Sorry, God. One of the Wise Men is black with a beard and a purple robe. He is her favourite. We three kings of Orient are, smoking on a rubber cigar, it was loaded, it exploded, now we’re on yonder star…. It’s impossible not to think of those words when contemplating the nativity scene. Madeleine banishes blasphemy by thinking of the Baby Jesus, for whom she is filled with a fervent love. She kneels before the sewing table, bows her head against the drawer where He lies waiting to be born, and tears come to her eyes as she prays that this time no one will hurt Him.

  The house begins to smell a lot like Christmas. Mimi has been busy baking: shortbreads, icebox cookies, sugar cookies, “porkpies”—iced date tarts that resemble their millinerial namesake. The kids use the cookie cutters to make bells, stars and snowmen, decorating them with bits of green and red maraschino cherries. Festive tins pile up on the counters, wax paper peeking out from beneath the lids. Mimi takes the first of les meat-pies from the oven—spicy and mouthwatering, the Québécois call them tourtières—then gets to work on les crêpes râpées. At some point she will call everyone down to the basement to take a stir of the Christmas cake batter—it has been fermenting since November.

  Mimi and Jack read Madeleine’s letter to Santa Claus and laugh out loud. Their little girl wants a cap gun and holster “or any kind of gun,” a skateboard and a walkie-talkie. There is a polite PS reminding Santa that she has enough nice dolls which he has been kind enough to bring her in the past.

  Jack puts up the Christmas lights with a minimum of swearing under his breath, borrowing a ladder from Henry Froelich and counting the burn-outs to see how many bulbs he’ll need to pick up at Canadian Tire. He takes the kids to get a tree from the temporary pine forest set up at the Exeter Fairgrounds. Thick flakes fall as though on cue from Frank Capra. They pick one that is not quite perfect, pained at the thought that this brave yet blighted tree might not be taken home and loved this Christmas. The bare patch can always go against the wall.

  Jack digs out the tree-stand, which he threatens each year to throw away, it clearly having been designed “by a Frenchman” for maximum frustration, and, enlisting his son’s help, performs the annual feat of engineering—shimming, trimming, sawing and straightening. “Careful, Jack, I don’t want you looking like a pirate again for Christmas.” He shakes his head, mock-rueful, as they recall the time he was poked in his good eye by a spruce needle and wound up wearing a patch till New Year’s. That was the year they all had the flu and Madeleine was teething. “That was one of the nicest Christmases ever, remember, Missus?” He kisses her. She says, “It’s still too far to the right.” He puts the electric star on top, strings the lights, plugs it all in and his wife and kids applaud.

  Two Saturdays before Christmas, the family goes into London. They have split up, Jack taking Madeleine to buy a present for her mother and Mimi taking Michel to buy for his father. They are to meet up again across from the Laura Secord’s in front of Simpson’s, and trade. Madeleine buys a ceramic frog for her mother, its mouth open wide to hold a pot scrubber.

  The street lights come on and, with them, the electric stars and giant candles that arch overhead and cast a multicoloured glow on the crowds below. Carols play over a loudspeaker mounted at the entrance to the market building, Hark the herald angels sing…. Madeleine holds her father’s hand in its huge black glove, and the two of them gaze in the Simpson’s window, where toys ride a train through a winter wonderland, teddy bears skate on a frozen pond, and a jazz combo of cats plays beneath a Christmas tree.

  She chooses her words carefully. “Some kids in my class don’t believe in Santa Claus.”

  Jack knows it’s a test. “Oh? Why not?”

  She presents the case against Santa: one sled could not hold all those presents, one person could never cover the globe in a single night. Jack responds by asking her to speculate as to the nature of time. Perhaps what we think is the present is really the past. Perhaps we can only perceive reality after it has happened, and in this way we are like the stars: reflections of what has already been. “That’s why some people are clairvoyant—able to see the future. And it’s why others are able to time-travel. Like Santa.”

  “So … we could be already dead now?” asks Madeleine.

  Jack laughs. “No, nothing like that, what I mean is….” He looks down at her. She’s got him. He is suddenly pierced by the memory of a day long in the future—or perhaps already in the past—when she will grow up and leave him. No longer his little girl—the one who believes he has all the answers. Moisture gathers in the corner of his bad eye; he blinks it away and says, “I think we have to conclude that anything is possible. But that, if there isn’t a Santa Claus, we should make one up anyway, and enjoy the idea.”

  “Do you believe in him?”

  “I believe in the idea.”

  “Me too,” she says, relieve
d—Christmas still intact, no need for her to lie.

  At the clang of a bell nearby, they turn from the window to see a Salvation Army man. Jack reaches into his pocket for change just as Oskar Fried comes out of the market building, a newspaper under his arm, smoking his pipe. So the son of a gun does go out, he just prefers not to carry his own groceries. Jack is about to call out a greeting when his wife and son arrive—“No one is to look in any bags from now till Christmas,” Mimi says, pretending to be stern, and he smiles. “How’d you fellas make out? Mission accomplished?”

  Fried is crossing the street, he sees Jack and looks away. Jack is surprised by his own flush of anger. It feels like a slap, this rejection of Jack’s goodwill, his entire family here on the Christmas sidewalk. It’s an unreasonable reaction, Jack knows, but he is tempted to call out, “Merry Christmas, Oskar, Fröhliche Weihnachten!,” forcing the man to respond. Fried walks right past him, so close Jack can see his newspaper, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, bought at the German deli. Jack says nothing. He allows Fried to disappear into the crowd.

  Mimi says, “What is it, Jack?”

  “Oh nothing. Thought I saw someone, but I didn’t.”

  At home the four of them begin their tree-trimming party. The spruce has stood for a week with its lights strung and now it’s time to dress it up. Mimi has brought the boxes up from the basement, and they sit open on the coffee table, their contents glittering. The decorations are like a core sample of McCarthy family history—old tinsel from three postings ago that the kids refuse to part with; delicate birds with feathered crests from the first year Jack and Mimi were married, bulbs with skiers etched in frost.

  Jack is fixing an eggnog for Mimi when the phone rings. She answers it. “Another hang-up.”

  “Some crank.” He hands her the drink. He makes no move to “go for a quick walk” and phone Fried back, but as he reaches for a decoration, he feels his wife looking at him. More of a glance, really. It’s fleeting—his sense that she is waiting to see whether he will find a reason to leave the house. He feels himself colour and avoids turning around, saying to his son, “Flip the record, eh Mike?”

  Jack selects a bulb in the shape of an acorn and repairs its tin hook. That miserable bastard has phoned again, despite Jack’s request, his clear explanation, regarding using the home number only in an emergency. If he is lonely, facing a blue Christmas, all he has to do is agree to come home with Jack and meet the family. No, he prefers to behave like a thief in the night, a pervert skulking in the shadows. “Ouch!” Jack manages not to swear, but he is bleeding, a shard of the fragile acorn wedged in the tip of his thumb.

  Mimi runs upstairs for a bandage, and Madeleine hands him one of the unbreakable snowballs to which she and Mike were restricted when they were little. “These are my favourite,” she says, and he rubs her head.

  Bing Crosby dreams of a white Christmas and soothes away the dregs of Jack’s anger.

  The next day, Jack calls from his office to find that Fried is out of pipe tobacco. “That’s why you called my home?”

  Silence.

  “But you were at the market yesterday, Oskar, why didn’t you pick some up?”

  Fried says nothing and Jack can almost see him shrug. What’s he playing at? Last week Jack found himself carting the guy’s laundry down to the basement of the apartment building—Fried claimed not to understand how to use the coin-op washer. “It’s not rocket science, Oskar.” Jack had to time his shopping for Mimi’s gift to coincide with the rinse cycle.

  “I’ll bring some by tomorrow,” he says, and hangs up. He has to go into town anyway—for an honest-to-goodness meeting with an actual guest lecturer—he’ll drop off the tobacco on the way.

  The phone rings again. He grabs it, irritated. “McCarthy.”

  “Jack.”

  “Hi, sweetheart.”

  She asks him if he is going into London and at first he says no, then maybe, then “Do you need me to pick something up?” She needs marzipan for a torte she is baking for the Wives’ Club charity bazaar, but it can wait. She asks him what he wants for supper and he responds genially, “Macht nichts.” It’s a normal conversation, but he can’t help wondering if she has called to check up on him. How many times has she phoned when he has been away from the office? How many times has she told his admin clerk, “It’s not important, no need to tell him I called”? How many times has his admin clerk said, “I believe he’s in London this afternoon, Mrs. McCarthy”?

  He tries to focus on a stack of course reports. He will be taking work home again tonight. This is not what he’s getting paid for. He has begun to feel as though he is cheating the government, not working for it.

  Jack’s Christmas leave starts next week. It has been a logistical nightmare tending to Fried under the cover of office hours; it will be virtually impossible during the holiday week. Something has to give. He doesn’t bother to slip on his rubbers over his shoes. He walks out over a fresh dusting of snow, across the parade square toward the phone booth.

  The last day of school before the Christmas holidays. The classroom is gaily decorated, windows are stencilled with aerosol frost, Rudolph’s nose gleams at the head of Santa’s sleigh, and cut-outs of children celebrating Christmas in other lands adorn the wall above the blackboard. Mexican children flail blindfolded at a piñata. Dutch children overturn their wooden shoes in search of gifts. German children in lederhosen and dirndls light candles on a pine tree, normal-looking British children decorate a yule log and, somewhere in Canada, Indian children kneel reverently over a luminous manger in the forest.

  Mr. March conducts with his pointer as the class sings “The Huron Carol.” “‘’Twas in the moon of wintertime when all the birds had fled, the mighty Gitchee Manitou sent angel choirs instead….’”

  The song is beautiful, haunting, and happily Madeleine will not have to sing it with the school band. She prevailed over her mother in the battle about joining the Christmas choir, explaining that they practised with the band on Wednesday afternoons, thereby adding to the burden of Brownies in the evening as well as taking valuable time away from her accordion. She backed this up by practising tirelessly three days in a row. The result is that she is slated to play “Jingle Bells” in the Christmas concert, but it’s a small price to pay.

  “’Jesus, our king is born, Je-sus is born.

  Madeleine is being assailed faster and more furiously than ever by unbidden thoughts. For example, the word “ass” is in Christmas—unavoidable. What if she went home and threw the Baby Jesus in the garbage? Such thoughts are shocking, and she buries her face in her hands at her desk.

  “Sleepy, little girl?”

  She looks up sharply and turns to the assigned page.

  “‘O little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie….’” What if she took the Baby Jesus and touched her bum with it? What can she do about these thoughts? Pray. She tries, while singing, to ask God to remove the evil thoughts, but instead of white clouds and angels, the image of herself smashing a baby’s head in with a hammer appears. Rudolph saves her. The sight of his bright red nose like a clown’s; the memory of his fearless stand against the abdominal snowman, his humility and triumph on Christmas Eve…. She knows it is not right to pray to Rudolph, but the thought of him calms her mind, soothes it like Vaseline on a burn and renders it impervious to the assault of terrible thoughts.

  “You should join the choir, little girl, you have good pitch,” says Mr. March.

  Jack was surprised how good it felt to hear Simon’s voice. He put it as casually as possible—careful to keep any hint of complaint from his tone—that it might be wise to brief McCarroll at this point. Make Fried feel a little more secure, knowing there was a second car on hand, another number to phone. Or if not McCarroll, it might be time to bring Mimi into the loop—in fact she could help. She could visit Fried during the day, do a little shopping, cooking … as Jack spoke he began to like this idea more and more.

  Simon said, “Bu
gger’s driving you mad.”

  Jack laughed.

  “I didn’t warn you, Jack, because I didn’t want to prejudice you, but I’m not surprised. He’s working you like a bloody housewife.”

  “That’s about the size of it.”

  “Look, you don’t need to put up with it, I’ll have a word with him and—”

  “Forget it, Si, I think I know what his game is.”

  “Oh? What’s that, then?”

  “He wants a goddamn car.”

  “Christ.” Simon groaned. “It’s what he’s been after from the start.” Fried had asked Simon for a car when he defected. “I told him, forget it. Too risky, too complicated. He could drive it into a ditch—”

  “Or get pulled over for speeding.”

  “It opens up a whole new can of worms. An expensive one.”

  Jack surmised a series of false documents: driver’s licence, registration, ownership, insurance, plates. “Who will you register it under?”

  “I won’t, simple as that.”

  “What about—?”

  “Not your headache.”

  “Look Si, why don’t I brief McCarroll? It’s what he’s here for anyhow, and between the two of us—”

  But Simon preferred to take on the chickenshit task of wangling a car for Fried, rather than allow the Americans in a moment before it was absolutely necessary. He said it was because he wanted the operation to remain airtight. Briefing McCarroll would mean making it porous. That would mean air pockets. “And you know what that means.”

  “Turbulence,” said Jack.

  “Don’t say I never gave you a Christmas present.”

  Midweek, Jack catches a quick flight on a Beechcraft Expediter to Toronto. He has lunch with his counterpart, the OC of the Staff School up on Avenue Road, and makes plans for an exchange. Then he takes a taxi out to Toronto International Airport. Following Simon’s directions, he walks to the far northeast corner of the parking lot. Simon has worked quickly as usual. The 1963 metallic blue Ford Galaxy coupe is there waiting, just as Simon said it would be, with a brand-new set of Ontario plates. Jack opens the door, lifts the mat and finds the keys. It’s a spiffy set of wheels, the kind he would like to buy for Mimi when they can afford a second car.